Customer Reviews

Developing Quality Metadata: Building Innovative Tools and Workflow Solutions

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I am disappointed about the book. Looking at the title of the book and author's background as Technical System Architect at BBC Technology, I was expecting much more.

I rush the book delivering to me so I can read on the airplane. But I was very very disappointed to see the book is not what I expected and decided not even carry the book on the plane.


I was hoping the book will cover the metadata design and model, deployment, practicle use cases in BBC, and use of the workflow in quality control, integration in the real production; I was hoping the authors will discuss changlleges and issues in the deployment and remedies to avoid them etc.

But the book structure is totally different, the two-part book descrives something else. The first part, "theory" as the author called, descrives a bit of every thing related to metadata: such as field, date parsing, database, XML, big and small indian, data in text format (CVS, TSV), graphics and image, standards, scripting language, command language, shells, unix etc. --- in other words, any disjointed computer science topics related to metadata. Even there are some sparse descriptions about broadcasting
and metadata used in broadcasting (which is useful), the whole part is not very well organized.

All this first part provides the basis for the second part, the author called tutorials: 62 how to tips: Most of them, just Unix shell commands/scripts, which may or may not related to metadata:

for example,

tutorial 9: monitoring your operating system logs
tutorial 10: measuring and monitoring disk usage
tutorial 37: shortest distance between two towns
tutorial 48: testing URL Hyperlinks

These unix shell scripts are useful by their own, but many of them are available on standard unix shell books, and doesn't belong to a metadata book. Unless you are planning to use a bunch of unix shell scripts to develop your system, these unix shels shouldn't be your key components of DAM/MAM system.

Overall, the book is not very useful.

Chester Chen

(Background: I am a director and Lead Solution Architect
of large media post production company, and have developed
more than one DAM systems)

Wootton explains the diverse ways in which you can make metadata that describes your raw data. In such a way that the metadata can be usefully exploited. Typically in enhanced searching of the data.

Unsurprisingly, the theory of databases is needed, and is briefly covered. Where the fields, records and tables of such a database are designed by you. There is practical, mundane stuff, like explaining data entry systems, and common formats of data files. Comma separated value and tab separated value are examples of the latter.

XML is also explained, for data interchange. A de facto standard, with a lot of support tools like strong parsers, that you can get for free.

The only problem with the book is exemplified by the back cover. Which says the book is for multimedia applications. In actuality, over half the book is general background, and non-specific to multimedia topics. But note that the book's title really doesn't promise anything about multimedia.