In Broadcast - May 2012 - 62

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 8 - MAY 2012

InMEDIA

The Metadata Challenge
By Nigel Booth, EVP Sales and Marketing IPV Ltd
In a typical business organisation or institution, content is often stored and archived within the department that originally created or sourced it. In fact every activity often has its own autonomous database(s) of information making it very challenging for individuals, researchers or investigators in one area to locate or even appreciate content and data owned by other parts of the same organisation. This is an all too frequent situation as people seek to effectively utilise and search existing media and captured data. Even within a single department the ability to successfully search and discover areas of interest is based on prior knowledge or the context of events. Assuming you can even get access to this data the vocabulary that has been used to describe or annotate content varies from one individual or department to another, yet we know for efﬁcient search, discovery and reference it must remain constant as a way of referencing disparate data sources. IPV has tackled these issues with the introduction of its Teragator and Metadata Central products. Using the power of the semantic web and standards based technologies, these are metadata aggregation and management tools that help users explore associated information and browse associated data from numerous and unconnected sources, rather than the traditional and often ineffective process of having to frequently switch tools, guess keywords and search criteria. Teragator’s sophisticated data mining and analysis techniques establish relationships between data stored across disparate sources and presents these results in a uniform user friendly interface with set structured choices for visualisation and action. Within the commercial environment, Teragator is the perfect tool for analytics and exploring business metrics. Its ability to mine multiple data sources, including live RSS feeds such as Reuters, or social networking tools such as Twitter, empowers business owners or content producers to make informed decisions. Teragator allows these disparate data sources to be analysed in a single, uniform application and modelled with different views to explore and discover statistical patterns, graph trends, set up event alerts and much more. Metadata Central is an IPV Teragator product that focuses on the control and simpliﬁcation of the vocabulary used in any organisation. It again uses the power of the semantic web to extract relevant data from multiple sources into a highly portable uniﬁed format to
Nigel Booth

aggregate, transform and cleanse that data for loading into any application. Metadata Central is visible across the enterprise and can be hosted in-house or through cloud based services. Applications for the service vary, however IPV have received signiﬁcant interest and success in the area of sports logging. Multiple data sets have to be merged – such as rosters, tournament venues, player’s salaries and even the rules of the game. Traditionally in advance of any event, researchers would manually pull this information together before any logging would take place, meaning misspellings and categorising errors were a real possibility during the event and as the season continued. ■

Modern Asset Management
By Tony Taylor, TMD
Whereas at one time it was enough for a broadcast asset management system to track where digital content was stored, and maybe move it between an archive and an online server, now we should demand much more. With today’s keen commercial awareness, content owners and broadcasters need their asset management systems to be much more than simple libraries with a database attached. They need to integrate media services from ingest through transcoding to cloud storage and content delivery networks. They need to synchronise rich metadata with multiple databases. They need to provide access to multiple users, and deliver to multiple platforms. And they need a single, streamlined system to manage all their assets, whether they are in digital ﬁles or remain as physical objects. Perhaps most important, an asset management system is a signiﬁcant investment for a broadcaster, so it must deliver a return on that investment, by opening up new ways to monetise content, and by improving productivity through smoother workﬂows. As an example, TMD has recently won a contract, in association with Dublin-based systems integrator Eurotek, to develop Fast, the File Acquisition and Server Technology project for Irish national broadcaster RTÉ. An important part of its requirement is that, as well as supporting ﬁle-based workﬂows it will incorporate storage and access to ensure that all of RTÉ’s assets are available to a much larger user base. “Fast is a hugely important project for RTÉ, allowing us to boost our workflows and operational efficiency, and providing much greater visibility to many more users across the production cycle, particularly for acquired content,” said John Hunt, Director of Operations at RTÉ’s television division. To achieve these levels of functionality and effectiveness without creating a vast monolithic asset and workflow system, broadcasters are increasingly turning to more flexible infrastructures, loosely described as service oriented architectures. This, in turn, means that the asset management system has to be open, to allow connectivity to external systems and devices. The TMD solution to this is called the Uniﬁed Media Services (UMS) toolkit. As its name suggests, it allows media services from multiple vendors to be integrated with the asset management in one seamless and comprehensive delivery platform. UMS is an API, based on web services. That means it is easy for network adaptors to be created, whether through a proprietary interface or using an open, FIMSstyle connection. The essence of a service oriented architecture is that it is these adaptors which connect to the common buses which exchange content and metadata,

Toby Taylor

Mediaﬂex Workﬂow Graphical Designer

rather than multiple point to point proprietary interfaces. The SOA can then provide seamless connectivity for both content and metadata. Data dictionaries are treated as media services just as content processes like ingest or transcoding. Multiple databases can be seen as a single system as the data dictionaries translate between metadata schemas, and outputs to content delivery networks will always be populated with the correct metadata. The move towards service oriented architectures makes content management easier, leading to big business beneﬁts. The key is to ﬁnd a way to create interworking between systems which is simple to implement and ﬂexible to change as workﬂows evolve. UMS is a simple way to achieve this, and so lay the foundations for the next generation of business oriented asset management systems. ■

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In Broadcast - May 2012

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