Multimedia today, if it is digitised at all, if it is online at all, still remains hidden on the Web and the advantages of online, digital existence are not fully achieved: ubiquitous availability, global retrieval, potential re-purpose and re-use in new contexts. To achieve these aspects, online media needs to be described, the description needs to be published in a way that online services can find and re-use, and the terms used in the description globally understandable and potentially associated with terms of other descriptions. Add to this consideration for expressing online digital rights to protect the content in accordance with the owner’s wishes and automated negotiation of licensing for online purchase or re-use, and such a Web-wide publication of online media descriptions forms, in our view, a ”’Linked Media Layer”’ from which new media services and applications can be implemented, such as those addressing Linked Television.
What is Linked Media?
”Linked Media” is the publication of descriptions of online media resources on the Web such that media can be found (and re-used) by Web agents based on interest in particular content of the media (what it conceptually represents). It is ”’linked”’ because the use of a common description format with descriptive terms using shared vocabularies and domain models will permit agents to automatically determine association types between media from different sources.
Taken from Lyndon Nixons WWW2013 talk, the four essential principles of Linked Media are:
- Web media descriptions need a common representation of media structure
- Web media descriptions need a common representation of media contents
- Web media descriptions need to use a media ontology which supports description of both structure and content of media
- The descriptions of media in terms of common representations of structure and content are the basis for deriving links across media on the Web.
How LinkedTV contributes to Linked Media
LinkedTV is the main driving project for Linked Media today. Within the work to realise Linked Television, we address the need for structured descriptions of the TV program using shared terms for the concepts represented in the program, and a common syntax for referring to fragments of the program, applying the same descriptive metadata to candidate Web media so that we can automatically link relevant Web content to TV programming. Within LinkedTV, we have specified how we describe audiovisual content in terms of its structure and contents, defined an ontology for modelling a full media annotation and work on approaches for linking (annotated) Web resources with (annotated) TV program fragments.
- Media structure is expressed using the W3C Media Fragment URI specification
- Media contents are identified using URIs drawn from Linked Data vocabularies such as DBPedia
- Media ontology is an aggregation of common description schemes such as W3C Media Ontology and Open Annotation Model extended with project specific classes and properties to form the LinkedTV Ontology
- Media linking uses a set of services which are generating descriptions of online media resources in terms also of Linked Data vocabularies and applying different concept similarity / matching measures to find the most relevant media items for a (conceptually annotated) TV program fragment.
Linked Media resources
In preparation.
