3.11 Future Development Needs

3.11.1     For all the recent work and developments, metadata remains an immature science, though this chapter will have demonstrated that a number of substantial building blocks (data dictionaries, schemas, ontologies, and encodings) are now in place to begin to match the appetite of researchers for more easily accessible AV content and the long-held ambition of our profession to safeguard its persistence. To achieve faster progress it will be necessary to find common ground between public and commercial sectors and between the different categories of audiovisual archives, each of which has been busy devising its own tools and standards.

3.11.2     Some success has been achieved with automatic derivation of metadata from resources.We need to do more, especially as existing manual processes do not scale very well. Moreover, metadata production does not look sustainable unless more cost is taken out of the process.”We should not be adding cost and complexity, which is what tends to happen when development is through multiple consensus-making channels which respond to the imperatives of a part only of the service environment” (Dempsey:2005).

3.11.3     The problem of the reconciliation of databases, i.e. the capacity of the system to understand that items are semantically identical although they may be represented in different ways, remains an open issue. There is significant research being undertaken to resolve this issue,but a widely suitable general solution has yet to emerge. This issue is also very important for the management of the persistence in the OAIS as the following example demonstrates. The semantic expression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the composer of most of the parts of the Requiem (K.626) is represented in a totally different way in FRBR modelling when compared to a list of simple DCMI statements. In CDMI ‘Composer’ is a refinement of ‘contributor’ and ‘Mozart’ is its property; while in FRBR modelling, ‘composer’ is a relation between a physical person and an opus. The use of controlled vocabularies is also a way of ensuring that W.A. Mozart represents the same person as Mozart.