Towards a Unified Multimedia Metadata Management Solution

With increasing use of multimedia in various domains, several metadata standards appeared these last decades in order to facilitate the manipulation of multimedia contents. These standards help consumers to search content they desire and to adapt the retrieved content according to consumers’ profiles and preferences. However, in order to extract information from a given standard, a user must have a pre-knowledge about this latest. This condition is not easy to satisfy due to the increasing number of available standards. In this chapter, we introduce some of the main de facto multimedia standards that cover the description, by means of metadata, of the content and of the use context (profiles, devices, networks…). We discuss then the benefits of proposing an integrated vision of multimedia metadata standards through the usage of a generic multimedia metadata integration system, and we expose the challenges of its implementation.