From Gunar

Public Patent License for XMP

2008-08-28T21:23:10Z

In the spirit of openness, we have posted a public patent license for the XMP specification on the XMP Developer Center. In the past we have received many inquires about the patent position on XMP, especially from larger corporations looking to implement the XMP specification.

What this public document provides is an open and free public license to develop and distribute compliant implementations of XMP:

Adobe grants every individual and organization in the world the right, under all Essential Claims that Adobe owns, to make, have made, use, sell, import and distribute Compliant Implementations.

This will further remove barriers to the adoption and use of XMP and a metadata standard across our partner solutions and ecosystems. Which is really exciting because better interoperability results in a better customer experience when media is exchanged across applications and services.

XMP

Metadata's dead...

2008-06-09T21:10:55Z

But the memories live on. Looks like the funeral industry in Japan has found a unique way to link to the deceased.

I talk about XMP metadata as a communication technology carried within the media but I never thought of it in terms of channeling my ancestors. Talk about embedded metadata, the QR codes are chiseled right into the tombstone.

Metadata seems to always add value to whatever it touches, even in creepy weird ways.

Technorati Tags: xmp, metadata, QR, the dead

InDesign Scripting with XMP

2008-06-09T16:40:00Z

I get frequent requests for how XMP can be used to automate the assembly and design process. This script demonstrates the ability to pull the Author and Document Title metadata info in the placed asset and place it in the InDesign document.

Thanks Steve for the blog posting.

Imagine if we were to start automating workflows based on other pieces of metadata... like rights information or design constraints - what would you like to see?

Gunar

XMP in the news

2008-05-28T21:20:55Z

Some new products that have added XMP support - looks like Drupa (happening this week) is spinning up PR announcements...

* NAPC Elegant 3.0 includes support for XMP in their Xinet connector plugin

* Fototime has added XMP support - looks like this was back in March

* ICS is showing approval sign- off via embedded XMP PDF support

Communication + Plex = Complex?

2008-05-15T00:08:41Z

TimeTube is a very nice UI for visualizing YouTube content no only as a timeline but as a list view, flipbook and map view. A interesting example of how to navigate videos with metadata.

I have been reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger - i am about halfway through. It reinforced the importance of faceted search as a navigation mode through loosely tagged media. Not everything can fit within a hierarchy, and there is value in slicing the information in different dimensions.

With different ways of navigating the information and the complexity of video (time based) metadata, we are going to see a renaissance in the display, experience and interaction with information. Infosthetics is a great site that has a beat on this with new examples all the time.

With the release of Microsoft's Plex, we may all be navigating metadata with our bodies rather than our mice.

I have a saying - "The more complex life gets, the more valuable design becomes." - It's going to be interesting what the Wii Gen will come up with for communication interfaces...

Technorati Tags: xmp, metadata, design

Eureka Like Metadata

2008-05-14T18:56:23Z

Something is starting to smell... like success. I read Joseph Bachana's article over at CMS Watch on Innovations in DAM, Circa 2008 - His view is that XMP is starting to take off driven by customer demand.

"Ever since the XMP spec was first released in 2005, commentators predicted the standard was on the verge of taking off, but it never quite did...until perhaps last year. Within the past year, virtually all of the digital asset management implementations my company has executed have included the XMP spec to varying degrees. It might be that we're influencing that as a consulting firm, but more often than not the customer is driving."

Well XMP has been around since the turn of the century (not 2005). It's taken a while for it to get adopted across the Adobe toolset and mature into a key technology. The turning point was updating the XMP Toolkit - the developer SDK that provides the same exact libraries that Adobe applications use to process metadata.

This was additionally reinforced at the Henry Stewart Asset Management Conference that just wrapped up in Liberty City...er I mean NY. Even though Adobe didn't have a booth, there was a lot of buzz about XMP from customers and partners alike.

Technorati Tags: xmp, dam, asset management, adobe

Economics of Trust and Permanent Metadata

2008-05-12T08:46:00Z

Recently, there have been some great concern regarding Orphan Works legislation within the photography community.  There is a lot FUD going around and attempts to address it - some of these discussion ultimately come down to the need for "permanent metadata" or more security ala DRM.

But this isn't an issue about security - the issue is about business - which is about trust between buyer and seller - making sure that the transaction can occur as smoothly, easily and robustly as possible.  

Remember the time when there weren't UPC labels (I barely do) - people went around tagging assets in the stores with prices, someone had to retype each tag into another machine to process a transaction.  Time consuming but even price tagging was a revolution in metadata and efficiency over haggling over the price of an asset.   UPC labels took it a quantum step further so that even today there are self-scan, self-pay stations - talk about trust!

Yeah, there still are thieves and people who switch tags but there always will be - it's a cost of doing business.  It doesn't make 
economic sense to shop for groceries in a bank vault.

There is a lot we can do to move the industry from haggling to UPC automation - so to speak.  But it will involve opening up the pathway for information flow throughout the Adobe toolset and making it robust but only to the point it makes economic sense.

This is where the DRM argument comes into context - it doesn't make economic sense depending on the business transaction - In the grocery analogy, my oranges don't have a security tag around it but my $100 bottle of champagne might (if you live where I do).  But ultimately it's the seller's choice.

Increasing the information flow mean preserving the metadata wherever possible, across file transformations, copy paste, compositing, etc.

Making it robust means, adding IDs (like UPC labels) that stay with the file and can be resolved to an owner.  It may also mean storing those IDs in more robust places in the file in case the metadata gets accidentally stripped.

Yes ubiquity and security pull in opposite directions, but it's about finding the right tension based on the economics of business which is ultimately the economics of trust.

What do you think Adobe could do to move the industry forward?

Technorati Tags: metadata, DRM, XMP, orphan works, photography

Introduction to XMP from IDEAlliance

2008-05-05T21:00:11Z

IDEAlliance is providing a free introductory webinar on XMP. on May 8th @ 2:00 Eastern. IDEAlliance is a non-profit standards organization that is focused on defining best practices within the publishing and information technology industry.

There is also a XMP-Open event May 14th from 9:00-12:00 in New York that I will attend. If you are interested in how metadata can improve your business, and sharing best practices, this is the event to attend.

I have been working with IDEAlliance for many years on multiple efforts related to metadata and XMP. The Digital Imaging Submission Standards (DISC) was the first to use XMP as a standard for information exchange between the pro photographer and magazine publisher. The PRISM Standard (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) version 2.0 is based on XMP as well.

In general I have seen a growth of communities and industries coming together to standardize the exchange of information related to media exchanged. This fits the XMP model perfectly since the information can be embedded directly in the media. It also helps that Adobe's creative tools can be extended to support custom namespaces and schemas.

Technorati Tags: xmp, metadata, publishing, tagging, standards, training, xmpopen

QR Codes and Metadata

2008-04-24T17:31:54Z

QR Codes are still big in Japan. The data is old (2005) but interesting:

90% under 20 were using them.
84% were using them from magazines - women using them for mail order
74% for access URLs
27% (high I thought) for ecommerce purchase from magazines

What is big in Japan can sometimes translate to being big in the rest of the world - I remember competitive reality TV shows being huge years before Survivor hit the US. But other things will never translate. But I digress...

Google is also getting into the picture with QVC with a test campaign with Blue Nile - with promising initial results - "The code-enhanced ads ended up driving 6.5 times more revenue than the ads without."

and you can't even escape McDonalds - supersize that QR code?

The British are not immune either, Harrods in England is getting into the mobile barcode space. - "This is an attempt to connect with a more tech-savvy audience, and frankly we're quite pleased if the whole campaign remains a bit 'cult'."

Well, those in the 'cult' most likely are early adopters, tech savvy, and have disposable income. Not surprising to see the advertising markets get interested.

QR codes are fundamentally ways in which metadata can act as a link, or portal to additional information. A link that can bridge print to mobile, and help bring a more engaging experience directly to the user on demand from a print source.

From a business owner's perspective (the advertiser of the product), it allows better tracking of the ROI of print materials - how are they being used and consumed, and most excitingly when and where (and possibly by whom). It opens up a whole new exciting world of analytics that can be used to tune a print ad campaign that was previously hard to do - demographics meets geographics for ad placement with real time feedback. No wonder Google is interest.

For now it's fun creating your own and thinking about how this can knit together the print and online experience. Who knew metadata could give you that warm fuzzy feeling?

Technorati Tags: xmp, metadata, QR, mobile, print

Metadata Games

2008-04-23T01:19:04Z

Good to see other metadata blogs out there. I noticed from Beth's page a number of interesting links.

The one about Fastr caught my interest as a way to tag Flickr images.

I see that Scott has added Groups support to Fastr so one could further narrow the context of the game to be within the "food" group or "travel" group.

It would be interesting if the guess were to be reapplied back to the
image owners as "social tags". The original owner could then choose to
accept the tags or not.

This "giving back" would be a more of an open source approach to collecting metadata rather than Google's approach with Image Labeler. Which seems to be focused on improving the quality of Google's search results -
"Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google's image search results."

Metadata games could actually be a cool idea for the home. I have an Apple TV and a Wii - I have often wanted to pick up my Wii and "tag" or rate my slideshow images as they floated across the screen. I could easily imagine a game where the family competed against each other to identify who is in the images - or does what Fastr is doing but with other people pictures that they have shared.

Love, Verse

2008-02-27T23:33:41Z

I came across this via Boing Boing with the original via Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Love (as in For The Love Of Game Development), is a mini MMO being created by one developer/artist - Eskil Steenberg. The visuals alone are gorgeous but his approach to building it and the technology he is using got me excited.

From Rock, Paper, Shotgun -

Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.....Players will be able to do things like deform elements of terrain, allowing them to build tunnel networks or walls to defend their property. Items will also be intended for the good of all as Steenberg creates them and drops them into the world. You won’t be picking up rifles in your adventures, but more likely the plans for the rifle-building machine, that can then be utilised by everyone in your village.

It's open source virtual reality that engages game designers, artists, players.

Some of the technology behind it is intriguing - like Verse - from the Love site -

Verse is a network standard that a allows graphics applications to share data in real-time. It means that two or more independent applications can share the same data. If you make a change in one you immediately see the change in the other. It is a free and open source system that can be integrated in to any graphics application to allow them to share data. You can collaborate with other users over the Internet, use it for content pipe-lining, games, VR, simulation and much much more.

Wouldn't it be cool to hook in Adobe tools into Verse so that designers can create items for Love, or even directly in Love?

Now, imagine if objects in the VR can tagged to offer richer description and interaction - perhaps he might be interested in XMP for VR entities?

XMP

The next big thing...social ready media

2007-10-30T01:03:10Z

ZDNet has a posting that states the next big thing is user contributed metadata. I agree. There is a trend to defining your own digital identity which can be used to match you to new friends, targeted ads, new websites, etc.

The key will be how and who will manage that identity. Currently there are large ecosystems that have quickly sprung up because of their ability to lower the barrier for connectivity between people - Friendster, My Space, Facebook. But your identity is still a prisoner of that particular ecosystem (hence the value it can provide to advertisers).

There appears to be efforts underway to provide a more open approach to identity and authetication. OAuth looks promising as a way to protect certain data and give other people access. Combine that with OpenID and you have the basics for a digital identity that can roam and interact on the web...if you let it.

So that brings me to the concept of "social ready media". Media is meant to be consumed, played, mashed up, and redistributed in the world. It's value is in it's ability to draw people together - a viral video, family photos, etc. Metadata within the media can play a powerful roll in enabling social connections. I have a tagline corrupted from Marshall McLuhan I use when describing XMP - "The message is in the medium".

If the media carried the social connections, I could easily build my social graph as simply as sharing pictures and videos and not be beholden to a particular wall garden of connections.

Technorati Tags: metadata, XMP

Metadata Resources

2007-10-22T21:56:48Z

The ASMP website has a great article on various aspects of using metadata that is of interest to photographers. Includes tips on preserving the original filename into the metadata using the rename option in Adobe Bridge and using Peter Krogh's extension to add the original file name to the Title field in the XMP and IPTC IIM.

In my last post I was turned on to the Bridge mash up with Google maps from Aldo Hoeben - very cool!

The Bridge Geotagger script allows you to inspect, set and/or edit GPS data embedded in photos using a Google Maps interface. It uses the embedded Opera HTML engine in Bridge to display Google Maps, and the XMP framework to manipulate metadata.

Definitely makes it easier to tag location into your images.

Technorati Tags: Bridge, metadata

Permanent Metadata

2007-10-04T18:25:03Z

Yes that would be cool! I am getting asked that question more and more lately. Each time it reminds my of the line "this will go down on your permanent record" - a la the Violent Femmes song. John and I have discussed this topic for his blog post but I have a few more thoughts on the subject.

There are a few techniques out there that can embed or weave information into the image file itself. In all cases it will affect the image quality to some extent - you are after all changing the pixels. In one approach a piece of information like copyright info is coded into the pixels in a specific pattern so that if the image is cropped or slightly modified, pieces of the pattern can be reassembled to reveal the original copyright info. Making this more robust depends on increasing the patterning intensity which of course will degrade your image more since you are modifying it.

Another popular technique is to visually stamp the copyright info into the image directly - this is an obvious deterrent but Photoshop is a powerful tool to amend these changes by a determined thief.

XMP metadata is basically a chunk of XML jammed into various file formats - a simple idea that can be very powerful in capturing, storing and updating information directly in the assets itself - like a little database within each file. The more tools that support XMP, the more that they can exchange information and work well together at improving the workflow. What makes XMP powerful is that is can be changed and updated. But there are potential improvements that can be helpful.

Currently metadata within Adobe products can be updated by templates that append or replace information. Append will add new info if the target field is empty or can store multiple values - appending the keywords field will preserve the old keywords and add the new ones. Replace will simply replace what it there with the new info.

I'd like to see a more refined approach to this to prevent inadvertently overwriting existing fields. One idea would be to establish a lock attribute to fields and ensure that our applications are aware of this attribute - so if a field is locked and a replace action occurs, the application will warn the user. The user then needs to unlock the fields in the UI to replace the data. Making this more explicit will help reduce accidental overwrites.

Another idea that has been talked about by the IPTC is the ability to have user specific metadata. The enables a situation where each editor of metadata can apply their changes without destroying the previous user's information. This raises a number of interesting challenges - authentication is required, you will need to log into Photoshop or at least we will need to pull the info from your computer (what if you use multiple computers with different login names?), then there are layers of access control that will be needed - do you have the permission to see my metadata? How do I manage these permissions?

Even keeping a history log of edits can become problematic if the assets is reused multiple times - for competing clients, how embarrassing would that be if they were to look in the metadata history and see the same picture has been used by their competitor?

It may be the case that metadata in the file evolves to become a "cache of convenience" with the authoritative information living on a web service. The web service model is designed to provide the authentication and permissions needed. The link between the two provided by unique IDs. In fact, unique IDs are already created by Adobe applications and stored in the XMP - that is what the XMP Media Management properties are all about. The ID model is also actively being pursued by organizations such as PLUS for referencing licensing information and Ad-ID for advertising info.

But even these XMP based IDs can be wiped out. As with anything digital, it can be hacked, broken apart and reassembled. XMP metadata is not meant to be DRM. If you want that type of protection PDF has some technology that can be useful. Even then, once the asset is free, screenshots can be taken etc.

I am interested in hearing what you think about these approaches. What else can we do to improve this situation?

Technorati Tags: metadata, Photoshop, XMP

Metadata at Max

2007-10-01T16:54:53Z

Excitement, technology, design, cool, AIR, flash, flex - what do these tags represent? Adobe Max in Chicago.

I am in rainy Chicago about present an update and overview on XMP across within the Creative Suite. My session is on making media intelligent with metadata. I'll cover the complete workflow from camera capture, layout to PDF archive. I will also cover some of the evolving engagements we are having with our partners and how you can extend Adobe applications to fit within your workflow.

Technorati Tags: metadata, XMP