Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Object 1.0 Draft Published

The Media Annotations Working Group has published a Working Draft of Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Object 1.0. This document specifies use cases and requirements as an input for the development of the "Ontology for Media Object 1.0" and the "API for Media Object 1.0". The ontology will be a simple ontology to support cross-community data integration of information related to media objects on the Web. The API will provide read access and potentially write access to media objects, relying on the definitions from the ontology. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

This is the second version of this working draft and from the "Purpose of the Ontology and the API" section I've extracted the following:

The ontology will define mappings from properties in formats to a common set of properties. The API then will define methods to access heterogeneous metadata, using such mappings. An example: the property createDate from XMP can be mapped to the property DateCreated from IPTC. The API will then define a method getCreateDate that will return values either from XMP or IPTC metadata.

An important aspect of the above figure is that everything visualized above the API is left to applications. For example.

• languages for simple or complex queries

• analysis of user preferences (like "preferring movies with actor X and suitable for children")

• other mechanisms for accessing metadata

The ontology and the API provide merely a basic, simple means of interoperability for such applications.