[ogg-dev] Working towards an XML based metadata format

[Ian Malone]

On 11/09/2007, Daniel Aleksandersen <aleksandersen+xiphlists at runbox.com> wrote:
> On Monday 10. September 2007 23:39:50 Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

(Meta(!) comment, are you using your email client's reply function?
I'm finding the threading for these messages is broken.)

> > 2) we need a XML annotation format for audio - in particular for music
> > - that is more structured than vorbiscomment (and this probably
> > applies to video, too)
>
> There are two possible ways to go regarding the format:
> 1) Build on XML+RDF and DC[1] with an additional name space for the more
> media specific elements and attributes required.
> or 2) Build an all new format name space in XML and incorporate elements
> from DC with RDF thinking.
>
> To argue for the latter: The Atom 1.0 developers choose to abandon the RDF
> and DC name spaces because they wanted a format that was not cluttered by
> and requiring multiple name spaces out of the box. They also felt DC was to
> loosly defined. (Note that RDF and DC combined in the case of a web feed
> format would end up being little more than W3C's RSS 1.0 specification.
> Cluttered and unendorsed.)
>

Notably Atom also ignores RDF.  After seeing RDF used to describe
Mozilla extensions I've come to realise that might be its more
natural use.  In defence of DC, it is meant to describe collections
and has incredible flexibility, whereas Atom has a much more
limited set of things to describe.  This does lead to it being very
sparse though (the problem I ran into when I tried to do this).  One
of my favourite DC examples comes from 'Using Dublin Core'[2]:

Title="The Bronco Buster"
Creator="Frederic Remington"
Type="Physical object"
Format="bronze"
Format="22 in."

This also points up one of its design features, the reason it
is less strictly specified to leave flexibility to the metadata
maintainers: DC on it's own doesn't give you a complete
vocabulary to describe everything, it must be tailored to
your needs.  I guess that's essentially what the Atom people
have done.

> [1] See http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/ and
> http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmes-xml/ to get the general idea of what
> this would look like.
[2] http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml

-- 
imalone