For the past year or so, I’ve been hearing bits of the film industry slowly wake up to the fact that the state of media metadata is a mess. The complete lack of open, common data formats leaves media producers struggling to conform their data to a variety of proprietary formats, only to result in outdated and inaccurate information left under the control of others. Worse, existing processes discriminate against independent producers by limiting what counts as a “real” movie, album or other work.

I have been working on a project called Open Media Object Format, which is a free (both as in beer and as in speech) protocol and file format for publishing rich metadata on a range of media. The protocol creates a distributed network of information on media and its participants, allowing the information to spread while every creator maintains authority over their own work. And the format is designed to store semantic data in more detail than we’ve seen before. The Open Media Object Format is an effort to address the above problems while bringing metadata away from the mere administrative, opening up possibilities for pretty cool stuff we haven’t seen before.

Details for the roundtable and the demo are below.

Open Video Conference Roundtable

Metadata Roundtable II: Best Practices
When: Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Where: Vanderbilt Hall, NYU
Conference registration required (it’s pretty cheap)
The participants are:

• Devon Copley (session leader) – Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
• Brian Chirls – You know it.
• Ben Dean-Kawamura – Developer, Participatory Culture Foundation
• Mario Pena – SafeCreative
• David Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Hack Day Demo

On Sunday June 21, 2009, I will talk through the details of Open Media Object Format and demo the first implementation of it, a major WordPress plugin (still in early beta) that any creator can use to bring media in from almost any source (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) and republish it as a blog post with OpenMOFo XML metadata output.

It will be a great opportunity to participate in shaping the metadata standard and to get a first look at a new blog publishing platform. I’d appreciate the feedback. Hack Day is at Vanderbilt Hall, NYU, the same location as the conference, and it’s open to the public for free. I’m still figuring out the rest of the details, so check back here or follow me on twitter for the exact time. Contact me if you want to suggest a time or let me know you’re coming.

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