The MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project’s goal is to create a platform for collaboratively annotating, retrieving, sharing and remixing multimedia content on the World Wide Web.
We will use this platform to discover whether distributed social networks can be exploited to solve the problem of how to generate useful machine-readable descriptions of multimedia content, by tapping into the implicit and explicit metadata flowing between media producers, enthusiasts, remixers, and casual fans. We will evaluate the usefulness of these descriptions by attempting to build innovative media services that rely on them.
The first phase of the MSMDX project, a study of an existing community of collaborative multimedia remixers, was completed in Spring 2005. You can download the full report or browse the highlights using the links to the right.
The diagram below illustrates how we see media and metadata flowing to and from different activities around media on the web. The corners of the matrix are meant to represent activities, not kinds of people. So, for example, a Flickr user might fluidly switch between creating and uploading her original photos, to enthusiastically tagging and commenting on others’ photos, to passively watching syndicated photos appear on her desktop or phone, to Photoshopping a Creative Commons-licensed photo that catches her eye and re-uploading it… The point of the diagram is simply to emhasize that each of these activities generates different kinds of metadata that potentially can be used to support the other activities.
