NET Nebraska Learning Services
& Metadata Across the Enterprise

Context
PBCore Integration
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NET Nebraska recognizes that like many other public broadcasting stations, NET has been focused on metadata descriptions as they are generated and managed by specific applications for specific data-handling needs, whether is it building an archive, an inventory system, or assisting production and post-production activities. As Terry Dugas of NET states, "Metadata touches everbody." Consequently, the interoperability of metadata at an enterprise-wide level becomes key to organizational missions and day-to-day activities.

The vision of NET is to build an asset management system that houses a variety of media types and mime types and uses standardized description protocols for the metadata attached to the assets. The common metadata terms can thus be used in a variety of applications across the organization (Application Specific Profiles).

The dilemma faced by NET at the present time is the variation in metadata definitions that different applications employ. For example, the definitions for "episode" and "title" are different in ContentDM (used for web archiving), Avid Interplay (used for content management), TVData, and Myers ProTrack traffic and scheduling software. The difficulty is in translating metadata from one application to another if data must be shared and interoperable. Building data transformation bridges can become costly, unwieldly, and a maintenance nightmare as metadata schemes are updated and expanded within each application.

As NET Nebraska moves toward its goal of building an enterprise-wide, asset management system that interoperates across various metadata-based applications throughout its organization, PBCore is viewed as the "rosetta stone" and common reference against which metadata can be mapped and shared.

As noted by Terry Dugas, in pre-PBCore days, hundreds of staff hours were consumed in debating the definitions for metadata elements and how they could be applied. When PBCore was officially published in April of 2005, its value was immediately apparent from the extensive work accomplished to create commonly understood metadata elements, along with their definitions, applicable authorities, picklists of vocabulary terms, rules for structuring data for individual elements, and usage guildelines. Anecdotedly, according to Mr. Dugas, NET was recently involved in a detailed discussion on the difference between an "episode" and "title." The PBCore definitions were produced and the committee agenda immediately moved on. (As an aside, during the development of the PBCore elements, the PBCore Project Team recalls that with the metadata element "Title" it was thought they could discuss and dispense with that "easy" description in no time. Instead, a full 4 hours were consumed in heated debates!)

PBCore is seen as a growing industry standard for metadata definitions that can be used by any television, radio, or new media project in order to answer basic questions about field definitions and usage. For NET, their initiative in developing an enterprise-wide asset management system will build in PBCore compliancy, while at the same time extending PBCore with specific metadata elements and descriptions designed to fulfill their unique data sharing and application needs.

NET has offered to share its mapping efforts between PBCore and the metadata elements employed by the various applications used at NET, including AVID Newscutter, Interplay content management, and ContentDM. These crosswalks are posting to the section of this PBCore website for Mapping PBCore to other Metadata Standards.

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