IFRA

The IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) has established itself as one of the most influential driving forces for news delivery standards. It started with the delivery of news agency text, then photos and graphics and today NewsML-G2 (generation 2) builds the framework for the delivery of all media types and even more: data will be delivered as well. EventsML and SportsML definitely have the potential to revolutionise newsroom planning as well as the collaboration and syndication between newspapers and news agencies. WAN-IFRA is a member of the IPTC and is co-chairing the Photo Metadata Working Group. You may download the latest version of the photo metadata standard here.

Stock photo agencies and organisations involved in cultural heritage have brought a new angle to the former news delivery focus of IPTC standards. Today, archiving, searching, finding and selling of images are of equal importance as news delivery. Standardisation can only be successful, if most – better all – stakeholders of the value chain embrace and use them. There is the chance to make life easier for an agency’s customer: newspapers, creative agencies, corporations. The increased usage of videos in the news and advertising business as well as affordable methods to digitise footage have resulted in rapidly growing inventory of rich media, which needs to be handled. As a consequence the Photo Metadata WG has started to liaise with broadcast associations like the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) with the objective to avoid duplicate metadata standards. The 3rd Photo Metadata Conference aimed to initiate this process.

All presentations and an introduction to the speakers are available for download from the conference home page.

Part I: What is metadata?

The keynote presentation given by Madi Solomon of Pearson Plc., the owner company of the Financial Times Group, set the pace for the audience. She described the many facets of metadata and its relevance for rich media management. Rich media is not self explanatory, so metadata are the descriptor, the perspective, as well as the narrative, it establishes connections between components. Metadata are big business and commerce, the largest data centres are operated by Google, IBM, Microsoft, HP and others to fulfil the growing demand for information, our perception of knowledge in the Internet age. The container has revolutionised the physical transport of merchandise, metadata will revolutionise the digital transport of content. Madi Solomon managed to describe the huge number of aspects, views and relations for metadata in a very entertaining way using two videos of the song “Proud Mary” which was covered by Tina Turner for several times as example. Metadata provide the foundation for business intelligence: the knowledge layer for meaning and context as well as room for subjective viewpoints; flexible enough for multiple formats with different instantiations of a single property; capture during and extending the lifecycle by digital preservation; prepare data connections between materials in whole or in part and maintains and builds conceptual relationships.

Max Wieberneit, Managing Director of Corbis GmbH Germany described the metadata usage at Corbis which today is concentrating on still images. Good metadata creation is based on the journalist’s five ‘W’s: who, what, when, where and why. Various examples underpinned the quality assurance procedure. Corbis sees the IPTC photo metadata developments aiming for serving b2b processes, but what about b2c or even c2c? There should be an open discussion about the applicability of IPTC metadata for b2b and b2c processes.

Lionel Faucher is the Founder & CEO of AKAmedia, a distribution company for footage distribution. AKAmedia has developed their own metadata taxonomy based on the material received from their clients. Sometimes they receive just an mpg file with a filename. Video files do not provide space for metadata (yet?). Most footage is delivered on tape, metadata are not stored on the tape and descriptions are mainly received by e-mail or by fax. Sometimes there is a “dopesheet”, sometimes tabular textual material accompanies the footage, sometimes the metadata format is proprietary XML – and imagine, the XML is written in Mandarin. The attribute of “being readable” by humans may be correct, but not for each and every individual. Until a standard – and IPTC urgently was asked to proceed in that direction – is established AKAmedia will use their own XML based taxonomy for archiving and will deliver metadata in any format requested by the customer, whether it is a dopesheet or another XML format.

Amery von Schoultz of TT, the Swedish news agency, provided an insight into to their video delivery system. It was gradually developed step by step based on the demand from their customers as they also moved into news videos for newspaper websites.

Part II:
Getting a handle on video metadata

Frank Biederich of Adobe gave an update about the Metadata Working Group (MWG) an initiative by Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony. Adobe’s XMP framework is the foundation for all metadata within the Adobe products and will become an integral part of Software for rich media and videos.

Yves Schmid Dornbierer of AntZero is developing a multimedia digital asset management system (DAM) called AtomicView. Metadata will be core of the internal database for search, retrieval and distribution of content. The internal database will contain a superset of existing metadata standards allowing to support user defined fields as well. Internally content data will be separated from metadata and content files will be modified only when required for delivery. IPTC metadata standards make sense for all file formats, others are for specific file formats only. XMP is seen as the “glue” for mapping and integration of various standards.

After a humorous sidestep introducing the Platypus Journalist , Dennis Walker of Camera Bits and Michael Steidl of IPTC elaborated on the feasibility and thought about the extension of photo metadata to video metadata. The Photo Mechanic software product will be extended from images to video. The existing structure will consist of various metadata containers along the timeline, which may overlap. After a gap analysis between IPTC’s photo metadata standards and the EBU Core (European Broadcasting Unit) the IPTC has come to the conclusion that the extension of photo metadata to video metadata will be feasible and the best approach to proceed.

Part III: Photo metadata follow-up

The Stock Artists Alliance (SAA) has started a new website about photo metadata and performed the roadshow "getMETAsmart" through various North American cities. The website contains introductory as well as advanced information about metadata and why it is important. The website was introduced by David Riecks to overcome the prejudice often heard from photographers that metadata are recognised as just “a big scary thing!”

Klaus Sprick of epa (The European Pressphoto Agency) reported about epa’s approach to improve metadata interoperability. The epaCore metadata standard based on IPTC’s IIM and released in 2007 defines 15 mandatory and 13 recommended optional properties. IPTC’s numeric NewsCodes for subjects are language agnostic and allow automated translation into any language, it is the only commonly used vocabulary in epaCore. epa is planning to convert all properties exactly as defined in the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard published in 2008.

Part IV: Metadata automation

Bernd Beuermann, photographer and IFRA Associated Trainer, gave a very practical example of how to take advantage of GPS data from the camera in day-to-day operations.

TRIPOD is a research project funded by the European Union aiming on the automation of image descriptions and captions. The focus is on the “where?” of the five ‘W’s. Digital cameras are delivering GPS data as well as the digital image. Both information combined with geographic data about location like landscape or architecture using scientific algorithms and databases are already presenting astonishing results. Please have a look at a video which was presented by Ross Purves (University of Zurich, Switzerland) during the presentation.

Tom Tinervin of picturemaxx presented the automatic keywording function of the Backstage software product.