Canonical Processes of Media Production
There is substantial support within the multimedia research community for the collection of machine-processable semantics during established media workflow practices. An essential aspect of these approaches is that a media asset gains value by the inclusion of information about how or when it is created or used. For example, metadata captured from a camera on pan and zoom information can be later used for the support of the editing process.
Though the suggested combination of description structures for data, metadata and work processes is promising, the suggested approaches share an essential flaw, namely that the descriptions are not sharable. The problem is that each approach provides an implicit model for exchanging information that serves the particular functionality and process flow addressed by a particular environment. The situation is similar to data formats with included metadata, such as the mov or XMP formats, where the combination of features hinders general exchange when the application does not support the features supported by the data format.
Our aim here is to establish clear interfaces for the information flow across processes among distinct production phases so that compatibility across systems from different providers can be achieved. We see this as a first step towards a longer term goal - namely, to provide agreed-upon descriptions for exchanging semantically annotated media assets among applications.
The work started in a workgroup on "Multimedia for Human Communication" at a Dagstuhl seminar 05091 and then a follow-up workshop at ACM Multimedia on "Multimedia for Human Communication - From Capture to Convey".
For more detailed description of canonical processes of media
production, take a look at the following papers:
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Canonical Processes of Media Production
Lynda Hardman, Frank Nack, Željko Obrenović, Brigitte Kerhervé, Kurt Piersol
- Capture and Transfer of Metadata During Video Production
Frank Nack
- Design and Production of New Media Artworks
Brigitte Kerhervé, Anis Ouali, Paul Landon
Canonical Processes
We identify nine processes based on en examination of existing multimedia systems (click on each process to get detail description):
- premeditate,
- create,
- annotate,
- package,
- query,
- construct message,
- organise,
- publish, and
- distribute.
The processes should not be viewed as prepackaged, ready to be implemented by a programmer. Our goal is rather to analyse existing systems to identify and generalize functionality they provide and, on the basis of the processes supported within the system, determine which outputs should be available from the system. In this sense, we hope that system creators will be open to providing the outputs we identify when the processes are supported within the system. We hope that in this way the multimedia community will be able to strengthen itself by providing not just single process tools, but allow these to belong to a (global) suite of mix and match tool functionality.