Proposal of a Novel Method to Produce Digital Contents - Attaching Metadata to Broadcasting Programs

摘要

According to future growth of communication infrastructures and digital broadcasting, TV programs will become to be handled in the same way as other many digital contents. The contents originally produced for broadcasting will be stored in digital libraries and distributed or circulated through the communication networks. In such a situation, it is required that descriptive information about contents, namely 'metadata', are delivered along with stream data of programs to utilize such applications as automatic content selection, personalized editing, or smoother retrieval on storage systems. On the other hand, the cost to prepare appropriate metadata for broadcasting contents is not negligible in the standpoint of current TV program producers. In this paper we propose a new method for production of digital contents including TV programs by which metadata can be added to the contents with comparatively easy operations. We focused on 'script' as a aggregate of metadata and introduced a new concept named 'PLAYBOOK' as a collection of audiovisual data and metadata associated with them. That is, data and metadata are managed integrally in the PLAYBOOK. This integration of the audiovisual data in digital form and metadata gathered in each process of production is effective to reduce the cost for preparing metadata for TV programs. The broadcasting stream of program and metadata which give descriptive information about it are output from PLAYBOOK, and furthermore, other related contents such as publications, packaged video, internet Web contents, and data for archiving can also be generated from it by proper translations or filtering. We applied this method to language education programs, and confirmed that it is effective for a specific type of TV programs.