1st Edition

Developing Quality Metadata Building Innovative Tools and Workflow Solutions

By Cliff Wootton Copyright 2007

    With the explosion of new audio and video content on the Web, it's more important than ever to use accurate and comprehensive metadata to get the most out of that content. Developing Quality Metadata is an advanced user guide that will help you improve your metadata by making it accurate and coherent with your own solutions. This book is designed to get you thinking about solving problems in a proactive and productive way by including practical descriptions of powerful programming tools and user techniques using several programming languages. For example, you can use shell scripting as part of the graphic arts and media production process, or you can use a popular spreadsheet application to drive your workflow. The concepts explored in this book are framed within the context of a multimedia professional working on the Web or in broadcasting, but they are relevant to anyone responsible for a growing library of content, be it audio-visual, text, or financial.

    1 Framing the problem
    2 Raw unformatted and unstructured data
    3 Record structured data
    4 Object modeling your data
    5 Data exchange formats
    6 Problems with conversion
    7 Interfaces and APIs
    8 Unicode and other code sets
    9 Scripting layers
    10 Dynamic content creation
    11 Time related data ? calendars and schedules
    12 People related data ? addresses and CRM
    13 2D Spatial data ? location maps
    14 3D models, data and space
    15 Motion related data ? animation
    16 UNIX command line tools
    17 Power tools (Perl, Python, Expect, Tcl)
    18 Compiled language tools (C, C+, Java, Objective-C)
    19 XML based tools and processes
    20 GUI tools and processes
    21 Automation with AppleScript
    22 Automation with Windows Script Host
    23 Automation with shell scripts
    24 Building tools
    25 Building workflows
    26 Adding intelligence and metrics to the tools
    27 Rights issues and protecting your data
    28 Lateral thinking ? using applications in new ways
    Part 2 The toolset examples (30 to 50 tools)
    A UNIX tool quick reference
    B AppleScript quick reference
    C Code sets
    D Relevant standards
    E RFC documents
    Glossary
    Bibliography
    Webliography
    Index

    Biography

    Cliff Wootton was the technical systems architect in the BBC News Interactive TV group. This team pioneered the "News Loops" service, which was nominated for a BAFTA Technology award and has won a Royal Television Society Award for Technical Innovation. His current research projects are investigating new ways to build interactive content creation tools for the emerging IPTV platforms