First specification emerges from Metadata Working Group

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 25 September 2008 05:57

Business IT - Technology

The proliferation of metadata standards has been causing headaches for users of digital photography. But a band of industry heavyweights in the Metadata Working Group has come up with a set of guidelines that should cut the confusion.

Metadata - literally 'data about data' - is used to store information about a digital photograph along with the bits that make up the image. Examples include the date and time when and the location where the photo was taken, and the camera model used.

The problem is that multiple metadata schemes have been developed and adopted over the years, such as Exif and XMP. Some pieces of metadata (notably date and time) are common to most if not all schemes, but even where the same information is stored, it may be recorded in different formats.

Generally speaking, different metadata schemes can coexist in one file, but there can still be problems. What happens if the camera stores a piece of data in accordance with one scheme, but the photo is used with an application that expects a different scheme?

Furthermore, some applications, such as Apple's iPhoto, store certain metadata in a separate database, making it effectively unavailable to other applications or if the photo is transferred to a different computer.

And that's where the Metadata Working Group comes in.

Formed in 2007 by Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft and Nokia (Sony joined in 2008) in response to a 2006 proposal by Microsoft, the Group's goal is to provide royalty-free specifications that will allow the preservation and seamless interoperability of digital image metadata across applications, devices and services.

The Group has now issued version 1.0 of its Guidelines for Handling Metadata, which addresses ways that existing standards can be used to address consumers' metadata needs:

"Who is involved with this image (who took it, who owns it, who’s in it)?
"What is interesting about this image?
"Where is this image from?
"When was this image created or modified?"

What form do the guidelines take, and what to the comanies involved have to say about them? See page two.