How-to set up PBCore & Genres for OMP

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synchlayer's picture

After a lengthy discussion about metadata in 2009 (see here for one instance) kreynen created a new PBCore module to allow those using the Open Media Project to base their genres on PBCore – PBS’s internationally used genre list of 228 terms – which kreynen details nicely here .

My suggestion last year was to create a tiered system with a few genres at the top, forking out to a variety of sub genres, as this degree of specification has worked well here in the past. At AmherstMedia we’ve now implemented a new genre tree based on this.

We renamed many of the PBCore terms, but tried to keep within the same general essence of the categories so that anyone else using this setup would be easily able to use our shows elsewhere with magically mellow metadata movement (just needed to alliterate).

You can use this approach in just a few steps:
1) Install and enable the PBCore module
2) Go into your Drupal mySQL database to make a few tweaks and adjustments. - I’ve created a screencast explaining this part of that process here

I’ve attached a screengrab & CSV of our genre tree as an example of the final layout. We’ll probably adjust this more as we use it, but it should be fluid enough to work for us, yours will likely look somewhat different, but you’re welcome to use this structure if you wish.

NOTE: You may need to rename the CSV file to be .csv after downloading - it seems to default to .txt

AttachmentSize
ACTV-Genre-List.png441.48 KB
ACTV-Genre-list.csv1.69 KB

Comments

westis's picture

I find this very interesting. PBCore is of great help when setting up genres and theme blocks. However, in its current version it's also quite limiting, seems like PBCore 2.0 will be a big upgrade in this regard.

I'm curious as to how you set up some of the genres in your list in relation to its PBCore equivalent.

  • Under "Education & Schools": Instructional, Lecture, Meeting. Those are very useful categories, but I couldn't find any relevant PBCore terms.
  • Under "Government & Politics": Local/National/State Government
  • Journalism, do you use "News" for that? Autobiography, Citizen Journalism and Mockumentary?
  • Lifestyle, what PBCore term for that? Interesting that you put Religion & Spirituality as a sub-category to Lifestyle, as I suspect that religious programming is considerable at most public access stations
  • Under "Science & Technology": Innovation, New Media, Sustainability
  • Not that we would use the same categories for sports, but I'm still interested in what equivalent PBCore terms you used for Collegiate, Hgh School, Indoor, Professional And Youth :)

One particular genre I miss is "International". A program like "Democracy Now!" would fall into that category for us, for example (I'm in Sweden). I'd also like "EU" as a sub-category to that. How do you handle such situations, when there aren't really any good matches?

Also, currently we have a theme block for shows from other public access stations. Not sure how to correlate that to genres, as the javascript once you select theme wouldn't find any genre suitable for such a theme.

/Daniel

ACTV Genre List

dericed's picture

Looks great. The hierarchy certainly makes it a bit easier to navigate as well as provides the ability to manage collection with either broad or specific terms as needed. Is a rendition of the genre list with hierarchy available as text (as opposed to a png)?
Dave

Daniel's Qs and a CSV

synchlayer's picture

@ dericed I've attached a CSV of our setup to the original post.

@ westis Hopefully the CSV will show you which terms we changed and to what, a little better, some of the shifts are close, others rather awkward. But in more specific reference to your questions:

Under "Education & Schools" & "Government & Politics" we mapped pretty much everything from other categories because these definitions just work so much better for us. It might make inter-station sharing a little weird, but should hopefully work.

I think Newsmagazine wil be used for most shows, like Democracy Now!, but we might also just use the main genre heading - "Journalism"

We do have quite a lot of Religious programming, but we currently have more House/ Garden and Cooking shows. Religion unto itself didn't seem like a discrete genre, I'm sure some will differ in opinion.

The Sports category is the most lets say 'innovative' mapping of PBCore to our terms. PBCore has over 100 very specific sports, some pretty obscure, yet doesn't have the one we show most; Disc Golf. This extreme specificity doesn't work well when trying to create wider definitions. We were originally going to do Team, Individual, Winter, Water, etc. which would have mapped better but the chosen listings won out for ease of categorization.

You mention the "International" genre - PBCore lists French and Spanish (apparently there aren't any other languages/ cultures that interest them - sorry Sweden). You could switch one of those to "International" perhaps. But we're less interested in where the video comes from or who made it, rather we care about the the genre of the material. In all the genre lists there's a lot of confusion between the thematic, the stylistic, the emotive, and the presumed audience. (PBcore includes a lot of this conflation as well as occasional uber pedantry- why have Children Special and Children Holiday Special?)

So when we get shows from elsewhere we'll look at the thematic content - which is hopefully what our genre tree represents - it isn't perfect and will doubtless change as we use it - I don't personally think that "Comedy" and "Drama" belong, both those concepts could be referring to films, plays, music, etc. which would be the thematic genre specification, Comedy and Drama are a secondary subjective judgement upon the emotive nature of the material. That's another aspect of the metadata but it's not wholly connected to this one.

The theme block issue isn't one I've got to yet.

To make it easier for

kreynen's picture

To make it easier for stations to compare pbcore settings, I've added a basic settings export to the dev release.

If you update to that latest dev snapshot and go to /admin/settings/pbcore/export, you'll get 3 arrays that show the official PBCore term and any customization of descriptions or hierarchy you've added.

Array
(
    [TV-Y] => All Children
    [TV-G] => General Audience
    [TV-MA] => Mature Audience Only
    [TV-PG] => Parental Guidance Suggested
    [TV-14] => Parents Strongly Cautioned
)
Array
(
    [ara] => Arabic
    [ben] => Bengali
    [chi] => Chinese
    [eng] => English
    [fre] => French
    [ger] => German
    [hin] => Hindi
    [jpn] => Japanese
    [por] => Portuguese
    [rus] => Russian
    [spa] => Spanish
    [urd] => Urdu
)
Array
(
    [Action] => Action
    [Actuality] => Actuality
    [Adults Only] => Adults Only
    [Adventure] => Adventure
    [Gay/lesbian] => GLBTQ
    [Sports event] => Sports
    [Mountain biking] => -Mountain biking
    [Olympics] => -Olympics
    [Polo] => -Polo
    [Pro wrestling] => -Pro wrestling
    [Snowboarding] => -Snowboarding
)

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