Open Media Metadata Standards Proposal

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Summary

The following is a proposal from Open Media Camp participants for a process to develop video metadata standards, particularly for video genre types. The proposal is to involve the Open Web Foundation to establish such a process.

The Open Media Project

The Open Media Project was initiated by Denver Open Media in 2008, and is now a collaborative effort with Amherst Community Television, Boston Neighborhood Network, channelAustin, Davis Media Access, Portland Community Media, and Urbana Public Television. The project's mission is to develop and distribute an open source tool set that will enable public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations to work together as user-driven, locally-focused, alternative media networks. Based in Drupal, the project is developing a modular, web-based system that makes local user-generated media more accessible locally and nationally through digital distribution. Leveraging thousands of open-source contributors, the tools are relatively easy and affordable to implement.

Open Media Camp

The Open Media Camp held in Denver, Colorado on April 18 and 19, 2009, brought together Drupal media module developers and implementers, including representatives from all but one of the Open Media Project partner sites. The Drupal developers who attended maintain some of the key media modules. The two-day camp at Denver Open Media's facilities was organized in an "unconference" format. There were sessions focused on metadata standards, video modules, CCK and Views modules, and media management, as well as on topics specifically related to the Open Media Project such as theming and MERCI, the reservation module.

Existing Video Metadata Practices

Public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations approach video metadata and media genre type standards in a variety of ways. Some centers operate with no standards at all and allow open or free tagging, where users choose their own tags or key word descriptors for their video programs. PegMedia, a media transfer site for PEG (Public, Education, Government) community television stations, with more than 400 stations and producers, only uses open tagging. They have no standards for genre or subject types. Rather than using a pre-defined taxonomy, this bottom-up method of open tagging generates what some call a folksonomy.

A working group of the Alliance for Community Media, a national organization representing thousands of PEG stations, is in the process of adopting PBCore, Public Broadcasting's XML metadata and cataloging structure. While PBCore is a recognized and accepted standard, not everyone at PBS is happy with it, particular with how PBCore handles genres. [[http://www.pbcoreresources.org/|PBCore Resources] is a place where some of this dissatisfaction, as well as ideas on how to move forward, is being expressed. Jack Brighton, one of the originators of PBCore Resources, who works in public radio in Illinois, had this to say:

. . . PBCore is simply a great standard for A/V metadata. It's simple enough for most people to understand, but detailed enough to be truly useful. But the PBCore project needs further work, including refining the controlled vocabularies for subjects, genres, and probably everything else.

This proposal's intent is not to detail all of PBCore's shortfalls, but rather to broadly bring forward the idea that certain aspects of PBCore are in need of development. In its application of the Open Media Project, Denver Open Media chose anouter route for media genre types. They created a draft genre list based on a standard developed by the European Broadcast Union called Escort. In a discussion about metadata standards on the Open Media Project's Drupal Groups forum, Daniel Westergren wrote:

I like ESCORT better because it's much easier to locate a genre for a program. PBCore is just a long, messy list and I fear that many producers will not really consider enough in what genre to put a program because they are difficult to overview.

Taxonomy plus Folksonomy

The partner sites involved with the Open Media Project could choose to adopt any video genre and subject metadata standard, whether it be based on those developed by Public Broadcasting, the European Broadcast Union, the Motion Picture Association of America or even the Library of Congress. What's critical, though, is that the project adopt standards that work for both the end user and for the open source alternative network designed to share and distribute locally produced video programs. This standard defines a taxonomy.

As noted, at the Open Media Camp there was also discussion about the value of folksonomy, and of the importance of the bottom-up approach for video producers to describe their own work. This method brings its own set of problems. When producers don't use commas between tags or enter characters (#, &, *), the resultant tags can be messy. Even so, there was a recognition that some hybrid method involving both a taxonomy and folksonomy structure would best serve this project and the people involved.

Proposal to the Open Web Foundation

At the Open Media Camp, the need was an expressed for the creation of an open standards group that could develop metadata standards for the Open Media Project. It was proposed that the partner sites initiate a dialogue with the Open Web Foundation and ask the foundation to help lay the groundwork for such a standards group. The Open Media Foundation was founded in July 2008 with the intent of helping projects such as this one lay the legal groundwork for establishing open specifications. Here is a quote from the Open Web Foundation's site:

The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

Given the clear and pressing metadata standard needs of the Open Media Project, and the stated mission of the Open Web Foundation to assist groups and affiliations with open standards, it is hoped that the OWF will consider the Open Media Project and assist the growing network of community media centers and television stations committed to this project in establishing a framework and process for implemeting Open Media Metadata Standards.

Author

This proposal was written and completed on May 1, 2009, for the Open Media Project, by Stefan Wray, Communications Director at channelAustin.

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