Notes from the gathering at Tate Modern, 1-5pm 8 September 2010
Meeting led by Rob Stein, notes by Nancy Proctor
Attendees:
- Andrew Nugée, Imagineear
- Chris McLaren, Tristan Interactive
- Robert Genereux, Sennheiser
- Lena Bonsiepen, Jewish Museum, Berlin
- Sayoko Teitelbaum, Toura
- Louise Downe, Tate
- Peter Gorgels, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
- Gavin Hogben, University of Cambridge & RISD
- Marco Mason, University of Venice, Italy, Dep’t of Design
- Lisa R. Tucci, Art & Media
- Glen Barnes, MyTours
- Sandy Goldberg, SGScripts
- Mia Ridge, Science Museum, London
- Steve Gemmel, Getty
- Silvia Filippini Fantoni, Cog App
Governance of the standard
Who will decide what gets in and not, who steers the initiative?
Recommend representatives from museums, vendors, researchers; will likely be self-identifying/volunteers.
Intellectual Property
Should be Commons Licensed.
Perhaps some of the industry organizations (AAM, ICOM, IMLS) who know about standards advise on intellectual property and governance, but don’t postpone building the standards until an officiating body is identified. Be pragmatic, look for shared languages and move from their towards standardization.
A Platform-Neutral Metadata Spec for Mobile Experiences
Tour
The root element for all TourML documents (the top level ‘bucket’). Discussion notes that not everything we’ll be building will be tours, but we’re aiming to establish a language that will adequately describe 80% of what we do; at this point at least 80% of what museums are building for mobile platforms can adequately be described as ‘tours’, at least in a loose sense, so ‘tour’ is an acceptable term.
NB: need to define the standard to describe what we’re doing today, not get hung up on what we might be doing in future.
Asset
A container for media and its metadata description; the basic unit of mobile measurement, the common denominator at the ‘atomic level’ of a mobile experience.
[TourML currently uses the term 'stop' for a basic media element (audio, video, text/HTML, image, poll); the group is concerned that this is confusing with existing audio tour terminology so identified 'asset' as an alternate term.]
Reference
- A reference, which can also be understood and experienced as a link, describes what combines stops into a logical structure.
- Each stop may have multiple references. A reference is either automatic or user-controlled. Logically, there can only be one automatic reference per stop.
- If a stop has no reference, it must have a stop code (see below).
- Reference elements have an attribute for autofollow which is default to false
- A set of references can optionally be ordered.
- In addition to order, references can be given navigation hints, expressed as attributes, for next, previous and auto-play.
Stops
- A stop is a container of assets, e.g. all the assets (video, audio, text, image) that together interpret a given artwork. It is a synonym for “choice” in the visitor experience of the tour.
- A stop has a title and a description.
- Stop describes the logical presentation and connections of a tour.
- Stops can refer or “link” to other stops.
- A stop can refer to other stops without having any assets of its own. In that case all the visitor gets is a title, description and the choice of that ‘stop’.
- Stops can be nested, allowing graphs to be drawn of tours for mindmapping and datamining.
Stop Attributes
- Stop code: alphanumeric, could be a stop number or a key word, e.g. answer to a riddle in a game-based experience. A stop code is mandatory if there is no reference pointing to the stop.
- Icon (optional): an override of a default stop-type icon
- Goto: a stop reference that is accessed immediately upon finishing the action of this stop.
- Lat/Lon [Locations/Position]: for geolocation of stops; could be indoors or outside [should be called X & Y to be more generic?; what about altitude?]
- Param: empty parameter that can contain anything not already covered by the rest of the TourML spec
Soundtracks & Soundbites
User-generated Input to a Mobile Experience
Connection of Mobile Experiences to Object Collections
Simultaneous Assets
e.g. playback of audio file with an image
Licensing Tags
- Expiration attributes
- Media rights, credit line(s)
- Watermarks
- Machine readable format
Source vs Publishing Formats (Asset derivatives)
Titles and Descriptions
to support multi-lingual content organization without duplication
Keywords/tags, description, closed captioning, subtitles (cp Titles above)
Next steps
- Summarize and clean up notes – Nancy & Rob, audio from Andrew
- Develop a valid XML schema that reflects this conversation – Rob, IMA
- Assemble sample content, example instances (xml) and use-cases that help inform and illustrate the schema – all
- Discuss, comment, adjust via online methods (wiki, conf calls, groups) – all
- Help spread the word, recruit more participants in the standards project – all