This section defines the SMIL 2.0 Metainformation Module composed of a single module. This module contains elements and attributes that allow description of SMIL documents.
Since these elements and attributes are defined in a module, designers of other markup languages can choose whether or not to include this functionality in their languages.
The World Wide Web was originally built for human consumption, and although everything on it is machine-readable, this data is not machine-understandable. It is very hard to automate anything on the Web, and because of the volume of information the Web contains, it is not possible to manage it manually. Metadata is "data about data" (for example, a library catalog is metadata, since it describes publications) or specifically in the context of this specification "data describing Web resources".
The solution proposed here is to use metadata information to describe SMIL documents published on the Web.
The earlier SMIL 1.0 specification allowed authors to describe documents with a very basic vocabulary using the meta element.
The SMIL 2.1 Metainformation module defined in this specification fully supports the use of this meta element from SMIL 1.0 but it also introduces new capabilities for describing metadata using the Resource Description Framework Model and Syntax [RDFsyntax], a powerful meta information language for providing information about resources.
The SMIL 2.1 specification leaves the SMIL 2.0 Metainformation Module
unchanged.
Please refer to the former SMIL 2.0 Metainformation Module [SMIL20-meta]
for information about metadata semantics, elements and attributes allowing
description of SMIL documents.