In Broadcast - July 2015 - 41


41

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 7 | July 2015

InMedia

Leveraging Unstructured Metadata
For Better Media Asset Discoverability
By Savva Mueller,
Director, Enterprise Solutions, Masstech

M

edia
Asset
Management
systems provide excellent tools
for managing the rapidly increasing
volumes of content that today's media
organisations now handle. Enabling
assets to be found quickly, easily and
accurately for re-use or re-purposing
is, however, dependent not only on
having a MAM with robust capabilities,
but also on the breadth, depth and
accuracy of metadata associated with
those assets.
More and better metadata not
only makes assets easier for the
user to find, but also enables the
system to better automate processes
to preserve, move, transform, and
publish the content. A key challenge
when bringing assets into a MAM,
particularly when bringing in large
volumes of legacy assets that had
not been catalogued with asset
management in mind, is the question
of how to efficiently create and

associate the needed metadata.
Users often think of metadata as
extremely structured, existing in fields
that have strictly defined vocabularies
or other rules. Some of this structured
metadata we can extract inexpensively
from information added to the file
by the capture device or upstream
processes. However, other structured
metadata, such as descriptive
metadata that is manually entered or
derived metadata that is calculated by
an automated system (for example via
speech, facial or object recognition),
can be extremely expensive to add either because of the person-hours
needed and specialised knowledge
required, or because of the costs of the
automated systems.
Unstructured metadata, such as
documents or other text-based assets,
provides an extremely efficient and
cost-effective alternative to these
manual processes and automated

systems.
Essentially,
this "Big Metadata" can
be any files that provide
extended information
on the asset. By taking
advantage of the rich
information
sources
that
are
already
available,
we
can
exponentially increase
the amount of metadata
we can use to describe an asset.
Sources of unstructured metadata
abound. For video assets from a
news broadcast, the scripts from the
Newsroom Computer System may
include not only the story text that is
read by the presenter on-air, but also
transcriptions of interviews and other
sound bites, graphic cues, editing
notes and more. For sports matches,
readily-available box scores and
match summaries provide a wealth
of information. Production work
orders and scripts for movies and
television programmes contain not
only dialogue, character names and
actor information, but also logistical

MassStore 8.0 UI Search Results

information such as the crew and
equipment used. Meanwhile, closed
captions and subtitles generally
contain the entire transcription of the
audio from the programme.
The ability of a MAM to efficiently
leverage
unstructured
metadata
enables the use of rich sources of
searchable
information
without
requiring significant manual effort
or expense. Dramatically enhancing
asset discoverability and usage, robust
unstructured metadata support is
a key feature of version 8.0 of our
Masstech for Enterprise Media Asset
Management system.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.masstech.com/masstech-for-enterprise/ http://www.tedial.com http://www.tedial.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - July 2015
