[ogg-dev] The use for an XML based metadata format

[Ian Malone]

On 15/09/2007, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves <justivo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's my take on the issue:
> Metadata is highly overrated outside the Semantic Web.  As far as I
> see, that's why nobody actually cared to support anything but Vorbis
> Comments, ID3 hacks (in MP3), and APE tags (in whatever proprietary
> format that uses that).  I believe Matroska has no metadata support
> either, but I may be wrong.  So, if it's for the Semantic Web, using
> W3C-based proposals are likely the best solution.  After all, they are
> the ones behind the whole thing to begin with.  RDF is probably too
> complicated for Ogg, though.
>

I suspect one reason this hasn't been done before is that
it's much harder to do this kind of rich metadata (for reasons
of specifying the structure, generating the data and
incorporating it in the bitstream) than to do the quick and dirty
'tags' that most common media files use in their various
incarnations.

As Ralph Giles pointed out a while ago there are levels in
metadata and we see all of them in operation: from the
free-form social tagging to highly structured rdf.  Whatever
we do should be easily mappable to existing schemes at
the least and this is also why I'm behind making room for
using existing formats; what we want, certainly in the web
context, is to plug easily into existing schemes, otherwise
it's a no-starter for that sector.

More to follow in a minute, but it's different enough to need
another email.

-- 
imalone