Multimedia Metadata Standards

The term ‘multimedia object’ encompasses a wide variety of media items (both analog and digital), with different modalities and in a broad range of applications. Multimedia metadata needs to capture this diversity in order to describe the multimedia object itself and its context. A large number of multimedia metadata standards exist, coming from different application areas, focusing on different processes, supporting different types of metadata and providing description at different levels of granularity and abstraction. This chapter discusses a number of commonly used multimedia metadata standards. It also presents a list of criteria that can be used to assess metadata standards. The standards are then compared with respect to these criteria. The standards and criteria discussed here are those that reflect the use cases, and were found to be relevant across a number of overviews on multimedia metadata standards coming from different application domains.