pbcore wordles
(Published on behalf of Kara Van Malssen who created these images.)
I'm a big nerd. I spent the last hour making wordles out of the pbcore elements. Its for a slideshow I'm putting together. It was so much fun to see the elements in colorful wordcloud form, that I just kept making them.
The biggest font are the mandatory elements, medium font are recommended elements, and small font are optional elements. I didn't include the essenceTrack sub-elements, but everything else should be there. Feel free to use these, or make your own at http://www.wordle.net.
Comparison between PBCore and VMD for Technical Media Metadata
VMD stands for Video Metadata and is a schema resulting from the Library of Congress AudioVisual Prototype Project. The documented schema lives at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/mets/Schemas/VMD.xsd and was last updated in 2003. From the annotation in the schema:
“VIDEOMD contains technical metadata that describe a digital video object. It is based upon metadata defined by LC. VIDEOMD contains 36 top-level elements.”
Carl Fleischhauer of the Library of Congress oversaw that activity and he reports that, in the end, the actual digitization was limited to audio and thus the VMD schema was never used by the project. He added that the community's renewed interest in technical metadata means that this is an excellent time to revisit the topic and consider how best to document the relevant facts about video objects.
PBCore is a schema as well as a set of tools resulting from funding by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The documented schema lives at http://www.pbcore.org/PBCore/PBCoreXSD_Ver_1-2-1.xsd and was last updated in February 2009. From http://www.pbcore.org:
“The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary (PBCore) is … a core set of terms and descriptors (elements) … used to create information (metadata) … that categorizes or describes …media items (sometimes called assets or resources).”
VMD and PBCore both contain specifications for technical metadata describing video. Since these “standards” were created at different times within different environments and represent two of only a few available options this blog post offers a comparison of each of their advantages.
VMD is designed to document the technical attributes of a single video object (one video file or one videotape) to be incorporated into a METS document. A METS document may contain multiple VMD instances with structural metadata describing the relationships between them. In contrast to VMD, PBCore is designed to support documentation of multiple video objects and their structure and relationships within a single record. Given these differences, meaningful comparative analysis requires identifying the appropriate level within PBCore to compare with VMD. VMD is roughly the semantic equivalent to the PBCore’s instantiation element and sub-elements which will serve here as the level of comparison.
The objective of performing this analysis is two-fold. First, to highlight some differences that may be helpful to those considering using either one of these schemas, and second, to identify specific strengths and weaknesses, some of which may prove to be valuable points of consideration for future alteration of both standards.
New to PBCore
I am doing freelance work for a PB station, and we are not yet using PBCore. This could change soon, however, so I am wanting to know about PBCore's cataloging abilities.PBCore is not dead
A person might be forgiven for wondering lately if PBCore might be a dead end. As some of us complained about elsewhere, there has been little evidence that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has funded the PBCore project from the beginning, understood that it was at risk. Until recently that is.
Following conversations at the Open Video Conference, a meeting to discuss the future of PBCore was held on July 6th at CPB headquarters in DC. Rob Bole, who recently joined CPB as vice president of digital media strategy, pulled in folks from the original PBCore development project, plus a few of us beatnik geeks, to hit the reset button and map out a plan. The phrases "change management," "PBCore 2.0," and "resources will be allocated" were clearly spoken.
Basically, CPB is renewing its commitment to PBCore. This means funding to establish a project management entity, which will oversee further development of PBCore and provide training, tools, and community support. i think we can soon expect to see an RFP for the project management entity, although it may be tied in with the American Archive project which is currently being piloted by opb.org. We shall see.
Meanwhile in the interest of sharing as much as possible, here are the notes from the July 6th PBCore meeting at CPB in PDF form. CPB has invited input from the PBCore community, and now would be a good time to push this forward.
PBCore licensing?
A discussion at Drupal Groups pertains to development of a Metadata module, possibly incorporating PBCore. The thing is, PBCore is currently licensed under a Creative Commons License, not a GPL which would be required for a Drupal distributed module. Which raises the question: How easy would it be to place PBCore and its documentation under a GNU GPL license? Doing so would be in the interest of the PBCore community, and I would think in the interest of CPB which funded development of the PBCore standard. Feedback would be appreciated!