Media houses use a wide and mostly non-standardised variety of metadata formats for their workflows and archives. The connection of new systems brings along time-consuming data mappings of the different metadata used by the providing and the consuming components. Instead of connecting the many systems involved using point-to-point mappings, unified metadata exchange formats allow quick transformation with only one adaptation to the exchange model.
Why is this of interest to NoTube?
NoTube aims at bringing together the TV and the web world. Thus, the TV metadata used in the NoTube use cases comes from different professional sources using different formats. They need to be aligned to a persistent metadata format used in NoTube. Furthermore, NoTube will explore the use of unified metadata exchange formats as convenient input interfaces e.g. for legacy systems.
The following video illustrates the situation in NoTube.
What NoTube has done so far in this area
After analysing the requirements of the NoTube Use Cases, TV-Anytime has been identified as persistent internal metadata format. At the time being it is the only standardised format used in CE devices such as STBs, PVRs etc. Following the use cases’ requirements, metadata transformation services have been developed.
For the use case “Personalized Semantic News” the mapping between PrestoSpace and TV-Anytime has been developed and implemented in several software components. In order to be future proof, the Broadcast Metadata Exchange Format (BMF) has been chosen as interface between the NoTube platform and external broadcast sources. Therefore the mapping process for the PrestoSpace metadata is done in two steps: First the transformation from PrestoSpace to BMF and in a second step the transformation from BMF to TV-Anytime. These two transformations are implemented as separate software modules which are used by appropriate services inside the NoTube platform.
As professional input format for advertisement descriptions for the use case “Personalized TV Guide with Adaptive Advertising” egtaMETA has been selected. To transfer this advertisement information to the internal NoTube format the mapping between egtaMETA and TV-Anytime has been specified and implemented in an appropriate software component. This component is intended to be used by a service to integrate the transformation inside the NoTube platform.
Future plans in NoTube
An essential requirement to support the requirements of the use case Personalised Semantic News is the CRUD (Created, Read, Update, Delete) functionality. This functionality will be implemented and provided to enable applications to retrieve and manipulate NIC objects without knowing the internal TV-Anytime format.
It is also an essential issue to ensure the quality regarding data consistency. This will be evaluated in the first months of 2011. During the evaluation and testing phase further requirements will be collected, if necessary, and will be used for the next iteration of implementation.
Find out more: See the Things to use section of this site
Who’s involved? Institut fuer Rundfunktechnik and Thomson Video Networks with Polymedia and The Open University in collaboration with other project partners.
Interested in collaborating with NoTube? Drop us a line and sign-up to our public mailing list (public-notube@few.vu.nl).
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Click here for further information on TV metadata interoperability
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