In general I found the workshop quite interesting. The good news is that there exists overlap in problems with regard to content adaptation from totally different user groups and interests which makes it worthwhile to think of a common metadata-vocabulary/standard. The next step for the workgroup will be to produce a rough draft of such as "standard" on which people outside the working group can give their comments. The bad news though is that our multimedia requirement are probably a bit too much to ask for at this stage.
The attendants ranged from, the mobile phone industry such as orange,France Telecom, British Telecom, Vodafone and Nokia, there were w3c people from the W3C accessibility workgroup, there was somebody from ICRA which does content rating for websites, and there was a representative for the XHTML working group. Unfortunately the interest for multimedia content was limited to the usual images in a mostly textual document. As a result the general interest was in what kind of metadata need to be associated with individual media items in order to make them suitable for content adaptation. Especially the mobile phone operators were not really aware of the importance of context in this but fortunately the accessibility workgroup, which (of course)very much relies on meta data was. In the end I think they seemed to be convinced that context was important and the role of media item and the relationship a media items has to other media items became quite important in the debates we had. So in conclusion, I think following this workgroup passively would be my first advise. Once the dust has settled down a bit getting actively involved might be worthwhile. Having said this, I think Yulia might be interested in participating (helping the accessibility fraction) at this point already since they were talking a lot about modalities.
The two day workshop was organized to have presentations in the morning, then, after lunch there were break-up groups discussing a particular topic. At the end of the day every group would present their conclusions. The first day the topic was to identify categories of meta data. In practice most time was spent on trying to understand each other and little actual progress was made in finding categories. The second day we were supposed to identify important and less important categories and possibly make a first shot on identifying elements contained within a category. This time the discussions where a little smoother and we actually managed to get a list of categories and sub categories. This list will be used a start point to continue working on this. (an edited version will be published in the proceedings)
Gave an introduction about accessibility issues on the web, and what kind of meta data was used to this. What I liked about this presentation was that she managed to make problems with regard to accessibility everybody's problem by defining scenarios in which, for example a blind user can be compared to a user in a car, or, a deaf person can be compared to somebody in a noisy environment. What I also liked was the mention of trade-offs/overruling: When a person is in a noisy environment -> don't use audio. However when she has headphones this rule can be overruled and audio may be used.
I tailored my presentation particularly to stress the importance of context of a media item. To be be honest I am not sure if I succeeded in that. People, in general, think multimedia generation is quite interesting but they can not really relate it to their own work, and therefore see it as two completely separate things. I am not sure how to do better next time, maybe focusing on just one dimension instead of all three (content,layout,presentation structure) makes the point clearer. Another option is to think of a non-multimedia example(possibly using SVG) where people can relate to and are able to identify the problem in their own environment. Another option of course is that I just need to present it better. :)
Talked about narrative and discourse in the context of educational systems. Had a few architecture pictures which looked very similar to the Cuypers architectures (which is a good thing). So far they had mainly focused on adaption based on content/reuse of "learning units" in the future they are planning to work more on layout and device independent authoring.
Lisa was one of the few attendants who talked about the importance of the semantic web in relation to meta data, which surprised me a bit. Most people were aware of the semantic web but had not made up their mind what to think about it. In general the opinion was that RDF might be too complicated and that authors will never create RDF documents about their content. Meta data creation should be easy and as less of a burden to the author as possible and they were not convinced that RDF was the way to go.