How Valuable is Metadata?
When you talk to engineers and programmers who have really taken a deep dive into media asset management, the subject of metadata is sure to come up. I often hear questions like: “How do you handle metadata?”, or “What’s your strategy for geotagged information (metadata)”, etc. In fact, the the holy grail of media asset management has to be auto creation of metadata, generally conceived of as some kind of advanced facial and object recognition. Homeland security is rumored to have something already working, probably powered by some parallel processing super-computer.
Based on what I have seen with our customer databases as well as my own, metadata often goes unentered and unused. It turns out that nobody has the time to enter the various identifiers in the appropriate fields. I have to admit to being guilty of this myself. So generally, we rely the items being placed in the correct books, pages, categories or albums. Searches can of course be based on file names or entry titles, but often the desired identifier isn’t there.
Tags are one type of metadata that does seem to get used. In our upcoming product release we are counting on this being the preferred way to add searchable information to video, photos and other media assets. One or more “tags” can simply be added upon media file upload. These tags are “un-categorized”, that is, they can be anything from a person’s name to a color, a noun like “dog”, “barn” (or more likely “red, barn”), really anything that might later make a search more productive. While tags represent a rather undisciplined approach to creating metadata, they sure beat the heck out of having nothing, particularly as a databases get larger and harder to casually scan through.