Metadata for digital video: soliciting input

[Grace Agnew]

Everyone,

At Georgia Tech we are working on a video database that is finally our own
videos rather than those belonging to another library. We are designing a
metadata  record  to catalog and manage the collection that will be an
XML-DTD.  Our eventual intent is to create the metadata as an Oracle table
(we currently use Access) but to report and validate as XML.  It seems that
the MPEG-7 standard will be a while.  This DTD will have a Dublin Core base
and an RDF wrapper and will, in its public manifestation (export and
display), hopefully be mappable to MPEG-7, once that standard firms up
more.  I am following MPEG-7 as best I can with that intent in mind.

One of the big issues for the metadata record will be the information the
user might not necessarily see--the administrative information that tells
us how the asset was created, what software is needed to open it, what
encoding standard was followed, etc.   The intent is to try and insure
digital persistence as technology changes.  Most discussions of digital
persistence focus on strategies such as software emulation and the backward
compatibility/migration path but I think for digital video (and audio)
another key issue is interpolation.  Future computers will not need digital
video to be compressed, so given that the compression algorithms are
documented for MPEG standards, I think we will see decompression algorithms
that might even happen on-the-fly at the users' desktop (whatever that
is--could be his/her glasses or clothes).  For this reason, I think
recording information about MPEG encoding level of service might be
critical, for example.

What I would like to know from the digital video community is what
technical information about encoding, editing, etc. we should include in
the DTD to benefit future asset managers who will actually have to manage
digital persistence of the video asset.  

I will be posting the XML DTD for comment and review and, when it is in
robust form, it will certainly be available for anybody to use, most likely
on the ViDe website. (http://www.vide.net).  We will be extending it next
to digital audio.

Thanks for any suggestions!  

Grace Agnew

Grace Agnew
Assistant Director for Systems and Technical Services
Georgia Tech Library
(404) 894-8932
(404) 894-6084 (fax)
mailto:grace.agnew at library.gatech.edu