FOCAL, the Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries, will hold a conference on “Metadata and why it is important” next week, July 10, in London. The conference – which can still be registered for – will examine the value of metadata in the media workflow and the importance of considering metadata from the very beginning. “What you shoot today is in the archive tomorrow”.

In the New Developments session before lunch, MediaMixer partner Martin Dow of Acuity Unlimited will briefly outline how the cutting edge media technology promoted by MediaMixer can serve to improve the creation of media metadata in the capture stage as well as subsequently its value for media storage, retrieval and re-use:

• Media fragment URIs can make individual media assets more valuable and flexibly re-usable by allowing different software systems to refer to specific spatial and temporal parts in an agreed manner;
• Media analysis technology can help companies automatically identify the relevant spatial and temporal fragments and classify the objects and events perceived in those fragments (see our demo);
• Semantic media annotation provides a rich association of high level concepts (persons, places, objects, events) to media fragments and the use of additional Web knowledge (ontologies) to answer complex, conceptual queries with relevant media fragments (e.g. “shots of US Presidents meeting with African leaders”).

MediaMixer is interested in a discussion about how media asset management and digital rights management approaches need to be expanded to take into account the support for media fragments and the association of fragments with rich, semantic annotations, if the above technologies are to be integrated into enterprise media workflows. Meet Martin at the FOCAL Metadata event, and join our community where you can also enter into a discussion with us.