[Clipart] developing an xml schema standard for packaged multimedia

[Mike Traum]

I tend to agree with what you are saying regading the files not being
in the xml itself.

But, a schema still needs to be created for the metadata. What group
would be the best for approching this idea with? This goes beyond the
scope of just clipart, although I think it does belong in the realm
of freedesktop.org.

I would highly disagree with the idea of bundling thumbnails (or at
least make it optional). I think that should be the job of
applications. There are plenty of thumbnailer apps. Besides, you
already get this for wmv, jpeg, etc with Windows Explorer and Gnome
Nautilus (wmf with the right plugin).

mike


--- Nathan Eady <eady at galion.lib.oh.us> wrote:

> Mike Traum wrote:
> > I think an xml schema should be developed for a bundle of
> multimedia
> > files. There may be one already, but in my brief search I was not
> > able to come up with anything.
> 
> Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I would think that an archive
> format,
> such as PKWare ZIP format, would make more sense than XML for a
> bundle
> of files.  Even OpenOffice, which uses XML extensively, uses ZIP
> for
> packaging up groups of related files together.  Seems to work very
> well.  Java and Mozilla also use the ZIP format for similar
> purposes
> (jar and xpi, respectively).
> 
> > This would allow metadata such as keywords and categories to be
> > distributed with multimedia, allowing easier use on the client
> side.
> 
> Metadata, such as keywords, can be embedded into the files (if they
> are in an XML-based format, such as SVG) using RDF.  For files that
> are not in an XML-based format, such as WMF, we have for lack of
> a better solution been placing foo.rdf right alongside of foo.wmf
> or whatever.
> 
> > For example, you could then download a bunch of clipart from
> > openclipart.org as an xml file. This xml file could then be used
> in a
> > multimedia organizer application which would give you the ability
> to
> > search keywords and see the categories.
> 
> The multimedia organizer application would need to have knowledge
> of the format in question.  If we accept that limitation, though,
> ZIP works just as well:
> 
> For example, you could then download a bunch of clipart from
> openclipart.org as a zip file.  This zip file could then be used in
> a
> multimedia organizer application which would give you the ability
> to
> search keywords and see the categories.
> 
> I don't see how using XML for the container format adds anything.
> 
> > I realize that svg has the ability to have embedded metadata, but
> > many other format's do not.
> 
> If you don't like placing the metadata alongside in an rdf file
> within the package, another option would be to put the metadata in
> a manifest file, which could be included in the package.  The file
> format for the manifest file could be XML, but ZIP could still be
> used for the container format.
> 
> There's a significant advantage to using ZIP for the container:
> users who don't have the multimedia organizer application installed
> (e.g., because they haven't bothered to install it, or because it
> does not yet exist currently) can use standard tools (info-zip,
> pkunzip, Nautilus, Winzip, recent versions of Windows Explorer,
> or whatever) to get at the clipart.  With an XML-based container
> format, that becomes impossible, and the archive is useless to
> anyone who doesn't have the special application.
> 
> I would think we should use XML for the metadata, but use
> ZIP or something like it for bundling up the files together.
> 
> It should also be noted that we really need to package up
> thumbnails, in addition to text-like metadata such as author
> and title and keywords, with each file.
> _______________________________________________
> clipart mailing list
> clipart at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/clipart
> 



		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Personals - Better first dates. More second dates. 
http://personals.yahoo.com