Functional Metadata

摘要

The current state of the art in content description (MPEG-7) does not provide a rich set of tools to create functional metadata (metadata that not only contains the description of the content but also a set of methods that can be used to interpret, change or analyze the content). This paper presents a framework of which the primary goal is the definition of functional metadata. A second goal is the integration of functional metadata into existing standards. Whenever it is not only important what is in the multimedia content, but also what is happening with the information in the content, functional metadata can be used to describe this. Some examples are: news tickers, sport results, online auctions. In order to extend content description schemes with extra functionality, MPEG-7 based descriptors are defined to allow the content creator to add his own properties and methods to the multimedia data, thus making the multimedia data self describing and manipulatable. These descriptors incorporate concepts from object technology such as objects, interfaces and events. Descriptors allow the content creator to add properties to these objects and interfaces, methods can be defined using a descriptor and activated using events. The generic use of these properties and methods is the core of the functional metadata framework. A complete set descriptors and descriptor schemes is presented, enabling the content creator to add functional metadata to the multimedia data. An implementation of the proposed framework has been created proving the principles of functional metadata. This paper presents a method for adding extra functionality to metadata and hence to multimedia data. It is shown that doing so preserves existing content description methods and that the functional metadata extends the possibilities of the use of content description.