Wild Basin Media

About MPEG-7

MPEG-7 is an important component in the advancement of video-integrated documentation. MPEG-7 is a multimedia (video, audio, voice, images, graphs, 3-D models, etc.) content description standard. Its tagged data can be passed into, or accessed by, devices or computer code. This description standard is not aimed at any one application in particular; rather, it supports a range of applications. MPEG-7 uses XML to store metadata that references multimedia instances. It provides fast and efficient searching, filtering, and content identification when coupled with XSLT or XQuery. MPEG-7 is not to be confused with other standards developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) such as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, as these deal with the actual encoding of moving pictures. MPEG-7 makes it possible to separate the information about video (i.e., metadata) from the video itself. This separation of concerns provides the key to the multimedia search conundrum, using a standard XML toolset and workflow.

Elements of the MPEG-7 schema can be attached to video time-code segments in order to tag particular events within video such as particular tasks within a topic. These video segments are then retrieved and viewed through the corresponding metadata. Video components described by MPEG-7 can be integrated into online documentation and made accessible to users in a similar way as are, for example, text-based components in DITA. From an author’s perspective, adding video to a documentation set is as easy as inserting a resource id into the XML source - just like one would for an image. Like their text-based counterparts, video components may be reused across topics and documentation sets. MPEG-7 offers a standardized approach to the management of video metadata.