Hi Richard,
I had a look through your email and it sounds very impressive. I'm sure
it won't be long before others offer to help or offer advice on how to
further improve your proposal.
Once your ready to submit it to the DMI project board, do give us a bell.
Cheers,
Ian
Richard Cartwright wrote:
Having left the BBC back in February when I was aware of initial
rumblings of the Digital Media Initiative, I was pleased to see that
the BBC released information about DMI through Backstage. Joined-up
end-to-end production of cross-media services will deliver a whole
load of new and exciting services to the user and DMI is about
providing the core technology for the capture, production,
distribution and archive to do just that. For some great examples of
the services of the future, see the use cases developed as part of the
micro-navigation of data under development by “JUMMP: Joined Up
Metadata for Media Playback”
<http://www.jummp.net/>
I have a very ambitious idea about implementing a prototype version of
the DMI model outside of the BBC using only open-source tools and open
standards, possibly hosted in an environment such as the Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud with the Amazon Simple Storage Service
(<http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=3435361>). My vision is to
create a global media hub using web services. Rather than using the
data model released by the BBC, the prototype would map the concepts
contained in the model to existing open standards, such as:
* Advanced Authoring Format and Material Exchange Format (AAF/MXF)
for wrapping essence (video, audio, data) with its metadata
(<http://www.amwa.tv/>), including edit decision lists, as
supported by Avid, Quantel, Adobe et al.;
* Ingex for low-cost content ingest of file-based content
(<http://ingex.sourceforge.net/>);
* Descriptive Metadata Scheme DMS-1 – a standard and extensible
set of metadata to use in describing production content (SMPTE
380M downloadable for a fee from <http://store.smpte.org/>),
which can be mapped to any of the following:
o Dublin Core (<http://dublincore.org/>),
o TV Anytime (<http://www.tv-anytime.org/>),
o MPEG-7
(<http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm>);
* MPEG-21 for expressing rights management information
(<http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-21/mpeg-21.htm>);
* MXF Mastering Format – for management of multiple versions of
the similar content (different languages, title sequences for
the same core video content etc.) (also <http://www.amwa.tv/>);
* Open Document Format for scripts, financial data, presentations,
diagrams etc. associated with a production
(<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office>).
All of the above standards should be generic enough to avoid the need
to commit to any specific codec. What surprises me is that the data
model as released by the BBC makes no external reference to existing
standards such as those listed above. Surely this conflicts with a
stated aim of DMI ... that it should “support open standards”?
So what is my motivation? I am about to release an open-source API for
AAF in Java that can be deployed to JBoss
(<http://www.portability4media.com/publications/p4m_ibc2007_handout.pdf>)
and this would be the ultimate project to test it with. My concept is
to set up a load-balanced cluster of JBoss application servers,
possibly configured as a JBoss ESB, and to create process
orchestration driven by JBPM (see <http://www.jboss.org>). Business
processes can be then be mapped to a common core of atomic media
services, such as transcoding, metadata management, media asset
management etc.. Behind this all could sit a clustered MySQL database
and perhaps even an Apache Hapood store for large essence files.
Resources such as the Amazon cloud, access to open specifications that
require a fee to access them or other computing resources do not come
for free but the initial costs of prototyping would be relatively
small and could be sponsored. Eventually, if the prototype proved
valuable, it could be made available commercially on a pay-as-you-go
basis at a margin above the Amazon or other hosting fees. For the BBC,
this provides a parallel implementation of the system to be built by
their chosen technology partner(s), reducing the corporation’s risk.
For anyone involved in the project, it would offer the kudos of being
at the forefront of the creation of a world-class digital media hub.
What do you think? Has this been done before? Anyone interested in
being involved?
Richard
--
*Dr Richard Cartwright
*media systems architect
*portability4media.com
*
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