Metadata, the glue that holds content together.

Implications: * Metadata is information that describes the contents of a piece of data or content  * Standards that make metadata created in one device readable in another device are in their infancy  * Most metadata today must be entered manually but this takes more time than most people can afford  * Metadata standards will help make digital photographs and other content easier to organize and share between different devices.

Analysis: Metadata is a somewhat ambiguous but useful concept.  It refers to data about data.  Metadata serves many functions in various industries and in consumer products.  Metadata has traditionally been written manually by people as descriptive information about a file or piece of content.  For instance, professional broadcast and movie capture and editing usually requires operators to enter information on when and where a piece of content was captured and who or what is in the content (or a real throwback, writing the same information on a label attached to the tape cartridge or other storage device).   

Professional video production has developed metadata standards to make portability and interoperability of content easier.  One of these standards is the MXF (or material exchange format) metadata standard.  The goal of this professional video metadata standard is to bundle the essences (actual content data) and what amounts to an "edit decision list" (data used by audio-visual content editing systems) in an unambiguous way that is essence-agnostic and metadata-aware.   Use of a standard metadata system in this application speeds the media and entertainment workflow and thus increases the speed and reduces the cost of content production.  

The Metadata Working Group consists of Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., Canon Inc., Microsoft, Nokia and Sony Corp and is dedicated to the preservation and seamless interoperability of digital media metadata and to interoperability and availability to all applications, devices and services (per http://www.metadataworkinggroup.com). The group announced a specification for interoperability and preservation of metadata in digital photography at the Photokina 2008 conference.  

The new metadata standard provides guidelines for the production of metadata that can be understood by multiple devices and people.  While this effort will be important for making prosumer and consumer digital photography more useful, most if not all of the covered metadata is entered by the user.  Camera sensor data files (often called RAW format) are mentioned by not covered in any depth in this standard.   

One feature that would be enormously valuable to most camera and camcorder users is automated metadata generation.  Automation of metadata creation (a technology that is in its infancy) is not covered.   Creation of standards for metadata generation are an important first step but the generation of automated metadata generation is critical for most users to organize their content and make it useful as they accumulate large repositories of content data.