Outline

Photo by Elaine Vallet

1. The World Wide Web Consortium
2. Different facets of media search
3. How to contribute to standards
4. What's next for standardization?

The W3C

Leading the Web to its full potential...

• Web Standards
  (X)HTML, CSS, XML, SVG, PNG, XSLT, WCAG, RDF, ...
  RF Patent policy
• Consortium
  320 members, from industry and research
• World-wide
  Offices in many countries, including Brazil, China, India, Morocco, South Africa, ...
• One Web!
  Founded and directed by inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee

Search is…

• Identification
  (the possibility to link to media content)
• Indexation
  (semantics and metadata)
• Context
  (geolocation, expressed interests, social networks, etc)

Identification: Media Fragments

Photo by Robert Freund

http://www.example.com/example.ogv#xywh=160,120,320,240
http://www.example.com/example.ogv?t=10,20

Indexation: Metadata

• Many standards
  MPEG-7, CableLabs, TV-ANytime, EBU, XML, …
• Ontology for Media Resource 1.0
  W3C Last Call working draft
• API for Media Resource 1.0
  (to access metadata from within the Web browser)

Context is…

• Geolocation, where the user is
  Geolocation API Specification (W3C Candidate Recommendation)
• What the user sees or hears
  Augmented Reality scenarios
  W3C Points of Interest (POI) Working Group
• The user's friends
  Contacts API (W3C Working Draft)
• What the user has
  (car, computer, music, purchases, …)
  Media Gallery API (early stages)
• What the user is, knows, likes
  (age, gender, studies, known movies, hobbies, blog posts, …)
  Final report of the W3C Social Web XG
• …

How to contribute to Web standards

• Use the existing standards!
  (unused standards are not standards)
• Provide test cases or use cases
  (testing is a requirement to solve interoperability problems)
• Participate in on-going developments
  (helps speed things up)
• Suggest new technology
  (see next slide)

In particular, contribution is not restricted to suggesting new technology based on project's results.

Bringing new work to W3C

Next possible search-related standards?
(plausible or not)

• More device APIs (e.g. speech input tag)
• Interactions with social networks
• Attention Profile Markup Language (APML)
• Metadata format for Web applications to ease discovery
• Best practices to write metadata in media content
• Guidelines on privacy
• Work on Web identity

Conclusion

• Open Web standards at W3C
• Search has different facets (identification, indexation, context)
• Different ways to contribute to standardization
• Work on new standards depends on expressed needs

Contact

Francois Daoust <fd@w3.org>

W3C Ubiquitous Web Domain
http://www.w3.org/2010/Talks/11-mediasearch/

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n°248687 - Open Media Web (OMWeb)