[Sigia-l] SMEF

[John O'Donovan-INTERNET]

> Livia wrote...
>>I would say simplified to the point of making it unusable.

It's a delicate balance between too much and too little.

We generally have people trying to build all singing, all dancing, swiss
army knife, all encompassing semantic metadata standards. We then have
projects and productions trying to use them.

The integration between the two is tricky, because in all cases we have
had to apply a profile and context to metadata standards to make them
useful to us in the context in which they are used. This generally means
supplementing or adapting them. Even SMEF (the BBCs own metadata
standard - which has been largely broadcast focussed, though this is
slowly changing) has to be applied - it's not taken in it's entirety
because it is just too complex and not all things are relevant to all
projects or productions.

A further danger then is that if you enforce too much metadata which is
not entirely and obviously relevant to productions, they simply don't
follow through on managing it properly.

So essentially, one of the biggest jobs in actually getting metadata
used properly by the business (as opposed to defining overall semantic
standards and metadata frameworks) is making it simple enough to use by
the business users themselves, whilst also clearly articulating the
value for them in doing this within the context of their own budget,
production, project or lifetime.

It's a practical approach based on human factors - in many cases the
simpler the better...as long as that simplicity makes sense in the
bigger picture. For example, 40 fields of description tightly managed
and properly filled out is better than 300 which are not well managed,
used, completed or understood.

Cheers,

jod

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

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