The Need for a Meta-Tag Standard for Audio and Visual Materials

Abstract

In Canada, as elsewhere around the world, government is trying to move into the Internet Age, to communicate more and more interactively with an everincreasing portion of the electorate and to increase the interoperability of digitized media. The Canadian Government Online Initiative, of which we are a part, is an example of this trend. To facilitate access to our materials, we need metatags, metatags that, by and large were originally set up to deal with print media. Thus, we have been struggling in recent years to apply metadata to a test database of Canadian cultural audio and visual clips that we call "Heritage Line". We have followed many avenues for making our data searchable and accessible. We have used the Dublin Core schema, both with the qualified set of elements as well as the unqualified set. Our problems arose specifically with respect to the elements 'type' and 'format'. Mpeg-7 currently appears to offer a solution to our problem.