Unified Access to Media Metadata on the Web: Towards Interoperability Using a Core Vocabulary

The goal of the W3C’s Media Annotation Working Group is to promote interoperability between multimedia meta-data formats on the Web. As experienced by everybody, audio-visual data is omnipresent on today’s Web. However, different interaction interfaces and especially diverse metadata formats prevent unified access and navigation. Related to this, three years of industrial and academic cooperation have resulted in the specification of an interlingua ontology and an associated API, which enable cross-community data integration of information related to media resources on the Web. This paper discusses the main concepts and achievements of the ontology and API for media resources. Its added value is illustrated by applications in the area of social media and metadata management.