How EN 15744 and EN 15907 came into being

From the TC 372 Workshop Compendium

So many standards to choose from ...

... and still nothing that fits the purpose?

Metadata about audiovisual media comes in many shapes. Depending on the usage context, it can focus on the physical or digital artefact, the public release, the artistic creation, the commercial product, the historical evidence, or whatever.

So far, only few efforts have been untertaken to integrate at least some of these contexts within a metadata specification.

Few guidelines and specifications address the work of film archives directly. The FIAF rules were published in 1991. Encoding of elements follows ISBD, which is mainly a presentation syntax. A major revision based on the recently published RDA is in progress. MAVIS is the only major database application specifically designed for firm archives. It uses a detailed data model centered around two main entities: the content of a film and its carrier. The manufacturers of MAVIS went out of business in 2007. Most other cataloguing applications for film archives are client-specific configurarions of database or document management systems.

Most committee standards from the television sector have a strong focus on the digital production and distribution chain. Most TV broadcasters use these standards selectively, e.g. when supported by digital video production equipment and systems. In-house metadata specifications are common and some of them are highly complex data models.

ISAN is a numbering scheme for audiovisual media products similar to the ISBN for books. Members of the ISAN committee have contributed to the CEN standardisation process. TV Anytime was an industry initiative that has produced a number of. MPEG-7 compatible metadata definitions for use with consumer devices such as digital video recorders. ONIX is a series of metadata standards for the publishing industry and the book trade. Numerous specifications exist for expressing rights and restrictions as metadata, usually for embedding in digital media objects.

Dublin Core is an ubiqitous standard applied to all kinds of digital resources. Using it for cinematographic works is problematic, however, since e.g. the notion of creator does not match well with the notions of cast and credits. PBCore is a simple schema used for metadata exchange among public broadcasters in the U.S. EBUCore is a minimalist counterpart to P/Meta, recently introduced by the European Broadcastung Union. The FIAT/IFTA data element list is a members-only document. EN 15744 can also be regarded as a core or minimalist standard.

Library standards are widely used in film archives, predominantly for non-film items and for film copies available for viewing. Library standards are known for good interoperability among compliant implementations and for poor interoperability with most other metadata standards. RDA offers a choice of encodings in addition to MARC. For a discussion of RDA interoperability issues, see [1]

These standards define elements and terminology for describing the contents of archives from the fonds level down to the item level. EAC defines an XML-based encoding for such descriptions.

CCO grew out of a set of rules for describing images of museum objects and includes rules for objects as well as for collections of these. VRA Core is an encoding scheme for descriptions based on CCO, centered around three major entities: collection, object, and image. CDWA is a comprehensive model and rule set for many kinds of objects relevant to the cultural heritage community. It has many definitions in common with CCO. LIDO is an XML-based encoding of a subset of CDWA, using concepts of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. LIDO Version 1.0 has been released in November, 2010.

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Creating a new metadata initiative

Researching the audiovisual heritage is a complex and time-consuming task, even in an era with plentiful resources on the Web, and powerful search engines always at your fingertips. In recognition of this fact, the European Commission decided to support efforts towards an improved infrastructure for information about cinematographic works.

One outcome of this support is the creation of two metadata specifications designed to make present and future filmographic databases more interoperable.

These are the standards that will be the subject of this workshop. How and why did they come into being? What can we do with them that cannot be done with other standards for audiovisual metadata?

In 2005, the European Commission issued a mandate, initially described as follows: "The Commission wishes to give the CEN a standardisation mandate for the adoption of a European standard on cataloguing and indexing practices of cinematographic works and on the interoperability of film databases."

As required by the mandate, the standardisation committee was composed of experts not only from the film archive community, but also from other interested parties such as libraries and other cultural heritage institutions.

Initially, the EU mandate included the development of cataloguing rules. This was soon withdrawn when it became clear that it would mean a duplication of the efforts of the FIAF Cataloguing and Documentation Commission, with potentially conflicting results. Some overlap remains, however. For example, referring to the FRBR reference model (more on this later) from a filmographic metadata specification will inevitably influence the approach to cataloguing.