This paper proposes an interoperable metadata model generating summary description for multimedia content using Dublin Core (DC). The motive is based on the fundamental concepts such as (1) Description information about the multimedia content is essential in multimedia content access, search and retrieval process (2) the existing metadata are too complicated to use in applications such as e-cataloguing and browsing of e-commerce. As an approach to solve the problem, summary description that may be optimally minimal descriptive elements set derived from existing metadata schemes (full descriptions) is described in this paper. The proposed summary description generator model is achieved using thesaurus approach built on the basis of DC and any existing various metadata schemes

Kim, Do-Nyun

Song, Young-Won

English

Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DCMI)

Proc. Int’l. Conf. on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001
47
Abstract 
 
This paper proposes an interoperable metadata 
model generating summary description for 
multimedia content using Dublin Core (DC). The 
motive is based on the fundamental concepts such 
as (1) Description information about the 
multimedia content is essential in multimedia 
content access, search and retrieval process (2) 
the existing metadata are too complicated to use 
in applications such as e-cataloguing and 
browsing of e-commerce. As an approach to solve 
the problem, summary description that may be 
optimally minimal descriptive elements set 
derived from existing metadata schemes (full 
descriptions) is described in this paper. The 
proposed summary description generator model is 
achieved using thesaurus approach built on the 
basis of DC and any existing various metadata 
schemes.  
Keywords: summary description, interoperable, 
agent, thesaurus, Dublin Core, cataloguing 
 
1 Introduction 
 
Recently, the demand and appetite of 
multimedia contents consumer or end-users is 
increasing rapidly in virtue of the development 
and deployment of internet technologies. As this 
volume of demand increases, the importance and 
usefulness of metadata is emphasized and drives 
many metadata frameworks to be developed in 
order to build an infrastructure for the easy and 
interoperable delivery and consumption of 
multimedia content. However, unfortunately, there 
is no flexible, uniform, interoperable or integrated 
metadata framework that can be applied and 
reaching a worldwide consensus in the 
multimedia consumption value chain exists. In 
addition, some description metadata frameworks 
or schemes are too complex to be understood and 
implemented with reasonable cost. As a result, 
metadata users or sometimes, consumers tend to 
be overwhelmed by their complexities. As an 
approach to solve the current problems, summary 
description using DC that is considered as an 
essential and optimally minimal description set 
is proposed in this paper. Basically, this paper 
proposes to employ thesaurus approach in 
building the interoperable summary description 
model of DC element set derived from existing 
a variety of full multimedia description 
sets[1][2]. Section 2 addresses basic approaches 
to build the proposed model.  Based on the 
basic approaches, section 3 describes the 
proposed interoperable summary description 
model in detail.  Section 4 shows an example 
of summary description composed of DC 
element set derived from MPEG (Moving 
Picture Experts Group)-7 MDS (Multimedia 
Description Schemes) description set. In section 
5, the validity of the proposed model is 
concluded regarding the practical e-commerce 
applications. 
 
2 Basic approaches 
 
In order to establish a summary description 
that is interoperable, optimally minimal, 
dynamic and maintainable, three fundamental 
approaches are employed and explained in this 
section as follow. 
 
 Multiple-to-one mapping mechanism 
 
The proposed model employs multiple-to-one 
mechanism that extracts DC elements set (one) 
from a variety of existing description schemes 
(multiple) containing full description 
information about multimedia contents. Since 
the purpose of this multiple-to-one mechanism 
is to obtain a DC element set from a variety of 
metadata element sets like a ‘metadata filter’, it 
is expected that the interoperability can be 
achieved. In a practical viewpoint, the ‘DC 
metadata filter’ is very useful in the e-commerce 
applications such as electronic cataloguing and 
browsing. One of the challenging tasks is to 
implement such mechanism that is able to 
generate a summary description automatically 
through summarization mechanism. One of the 
Interoperable Summary Description Model Using Dublin Core 
 
 
Do-Nyun Kim and Young-Won Song 
LG Electronics, Information Technology Lab., 
16 Woomyeon-Dong, Secho-Gu, Seoul 137-724, Korea 
dnkim@LG-Elite.com and ysong@LG-Elite.com 
 
©2001 National Institute of Informatics
DC-2001, October 24-26, 2001, NII, Tokyo, Japan
48
reasonable methods is to use thesaurus approach.  
 
 
 System-selected vs. User-selected elements 
 
In the multimedia content search, cataloguing, 
browsing and retrieval, the optimized and 
minimal set of descriptive elements plays a key 
role in the process.  However, since it is very 
difficult to define the optimally minimized set and 
to provide an interoperable metadata framework, 
the existing metadata frameworks may contain 
enormous number of elements as possible in order 
to overcome the practical applicability. As a 
fundamental approach, the DC is used. Also, in 
DC society, in order to provide more general 
metadata scheme, hierarchical qualifiers are 
recommended and used. However, still, there is an 
interoperability issue remained with the existing 
metadata frameworks such as MPEG-7 MDS, 
EPICS and etc[5][6][7]. This paper proposes to 
employ DC as a summary description.  If end-
users wish to investigate the more detail metadata, 
the full description can be accessed as a 
hierarchical manner. Since this DC summary 
description is extracted from the full description 
set, it is called as system-selected elements in this 
paper.  In order to provide a flexible model with 
the end-user like user interaction, user defined 
elements (or user-selected elements) can be 
declared in addition to DC in the model such as 
event reporting that is defined in the MPEG-21 
multimedia framework. In the viewpoint of 
interoperability, system-selected elements are 
efficient. User-selected elements are, however, 
more useful in the viewpoint of user interaction. 
Those two approaches are employed by 
summarization process described in section 3. 
 
 Dynamic generation by users’ demand 
 
Summary description is a sort of filtered 
version of it’s the original full description by 
nature. It is required to be generated by users’ 
demand on time. This requirement is expected to 
prevent users from wasting efforts and cost. In 
terms of storage efficiency, summary description 
is not necessary to be stored permanently, because 
it is related to a specific application. Hence, the 
model is required that summary description 
interacts with the full description in a dynamic 
manner in response to end-user’s demand.  In 
such case, the summary description maintenance 
issue such as summary metadata consistency with 
the full description and version control in terms of 
metadata updatability is required to be solved. As 
a plausible approach to the dynamic summary 
description generation, software agent technique 
is proposed. In this situation, summarization 
process takes advantage of agents such as 
automatic notification and automatic change 
tracking. 
 
Figure 1 shows the relationship among 
resource, summary description, (full) 
description, metadata of summary description 
(or Admin Core, Administrative Container 
Metadata, A-Core, or DescriptionMetadata in 
MDS), and metadata of (full) description (or A-
Core). The full description describes resource 
such as audio, video clip, image, textual 
document or software. The metadata of 
summary or full description such as A-Core 
describes simply the summary or full 
description (for example, who, where, when the 
description is prepared). Hence, the summary 
description is different from metadata of 
description such as A-Core [3][4].  
Figure 1. The relationship among 
resource, description, summary 
description, metadata of summary 
description and metadata of 
description 
3 The proposed summary description 
model 
 
This section describes the summary 
description model built based on the 
fundamental approaches addressed in section 2.  
 
 Using Dublin Core 
 
As a summary description, DC elements set is 
used. In the initial access, search and browsing 
procedure about the metadata, summary 
Proc. Int’l. Conf. on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001
49
description can play a major role in the 
perspective of end-users (In general they want 
simple, fast and automatic process). If users are 
interested in the corresponding content, users may 
request more detail description based on full 
description. Therefore, summary description 
needs not to be complicated and DC that has a 
wide consensus among e-commerce communities 
is sufficient to describe essential minimal 
description.  
In case any search fails using DC or user-
selected elements, or even if search results hit 
end-users’ interests but they want to find detail 
description data, end-users may access the full 
description for more detail in a hierarchical 
manner as shown in Figure 2. 
 
 
 
Figure 2. The sequence of actions 
using summary and full description 
in a hierarchical manner 
 
 Using thesaurus 
 
As described in section 2, the summarization 
process reflects many-to-one mechanism. In order 
to reduce ambiguous translation, the agent 
embedded in the summarization process utilizes 
thesaurus or dictionary – sometimes called 
controlled vocabulary. Thesaurus includes 
synonyms and antonyms. When elements of 
multiple and diverse descriptions are translated 
into those of summary description that is 
considered to be matched with DC elements set, 
the summarization process needs synonyms, 
antonyms and acronyms. Well-organized 
thesaurus has a significant influence on the 
performance of summarization agents.  
Figure 3 describes the summarization process 
including thesaurus regarding to existing full 
description[5][6][7]. 
 
 
Figure 3. The input and output of 
the summarization process 
 
Figure 4 shows a generic flow diagram of the 
summarization process. 
 
 
 
Figure 4. Flow diagram of 
summarization process 
 
Figure 5 shows a block diagram that 
summary description is used in electronic 
cataloguing application. 
 
 
 
 
Figure 5. Summary description 
usage in e-cataloguing application 
DC-2001, October 24-26, 2001, NII, Tokyo, Japan
50
4 Example of Thesaurus 
 
Figure 6 shows a part of thesaurus example that 
is obtained using MPEG-7 MDS and DC that can 
be performed by summarization agent [1][2][4]. 
 
Title – [element][A name given to the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS><Creation><Title 
type=”main”> 
 Alternative - [qualifier][Any form of the 
title used as a substitute or alternative 
to the formal title of the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Creation> 
<Title type=”alternative”> 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Creation> 
<Title type=”secondary”> 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Creation> 
<Title type=”popular”> 
Description – [element][An account of the 
content of the resource] 
 Abstract – [qualifier][The topic of the 
content of the resource 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Creation> 
<Abstract> 
<FreeTextAnnotation> 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Creation> 
<Abstract> 
<StructuredAnnotation> 
Creator – [element][An entity primarily 
responsible for making the content 
of the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Creation> 
<Creator> 
Subject – [element][The topic of the content of 
the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Classification> 
<Subject> 
Language – [element][A language of the 
intellectual content of the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <Classification> 
<Language> 
Coverage – [element][The extent or scope of 
the content of the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> <UsageInformation> 
<Availability> 
 Spatial – [qualifier] [Spatial 
characteristics of the intellectual 
content of the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> 
<UsageInformation> 
<Availability><OriginPlace> 
 Temporal – [qualifier][Temporal 
characteristics of the intellectual 
content of the resource] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> 
<UsageInformation> 
<Availability> 
<AvailabilityPeriod> 
Publisher – [element][An entity responsible for 
making the resource available] 
 <MPEG-7 MDS> 
<UsageInformation> 
<Availability><Distributor> 
Figure 6. An example of thesaurus for 
MPEG-7 MDS 
 
Note. In case of Title, it is a DC element. The 
meaning is a titled name of the corresponding 
resource. The matching element in MPEG-7 
MDS is <Title> element under <Creation>. If 
<Creation> is not specified before the <Title>, 
summarization process confuses with the 
<Title> of <PersonName> specified also in 
MPEG-7 MDS that indicates the titles of an 
individual, such as honorifics. 
 
5 Conclusions 
 
The conceptual model of interoperable 
summary description derived from the existing 
metadata frameworks or schemes is proposed. 
The validity and usefulness of the model is 
described. The summary description example 
obtained using MPEG-7 MDS shows the 
validity of the proposed model employing DC 
and thesaurus approaches. This summary 
description is expected to be meaningful in e-
cataloguing and browsing applications of e-
commerce.  
 
 
6 References 
 
[1] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Dublin 
Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: 
Reference Description, July 2, 1999. 
[2] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Dublin 
Core Qualifiers, July 11, 2000. 
[3] R. Iannella and D. Campbell, The A-Core: 
Metadata about Content Metadata, June 30, 
1999. 
[4] ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 N4040: 
Information technology – Multimedia 
Content Description Interface– Part5: 
Multimedia Description Schemes, CD, 
Singapore, March 2001. 
[5] Godfrey Rust and Mark Bide, The <indecs> 
metadata framework- Principles, model and 
data dictionary, WP1a-006-2.0, June 2000. 
[6] Carl Lagoze, Clifford A. Lynch and Ron 
Daniel, Jr.: A Container Architecture for 
Aggregating Sets of Metadata, June 28, 1996. 
[7] R.V.Guha and Tim Bray, Meta Content 
Framework Using XML, 
http://www.w3.org/TR/ NOTE-MCF-XML -
970624, submitted to W3C 6 June, 2000. 


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