PubForge Blog

(This post began life as an email thread, but maybe needs to be more public so here it is.  Edited and expanded for obsessive clarity…)

It strikes me as somewhat simple (OK maybe not exactly simple) to develop a Drupal-based CMS with enough commonly-needed features for public radio/TV stations.  You’d have your pre-built data types, skinable templates, forms, and possibly a set of pre-defined roles and workflows.  All nicely documented etc.

But what we all really want is a system that knows about media files.  You could upload (or link to) a media object, and the CMS would extract its available metadata.  The system would then save that metadata in its database for processing and display in various ways.  On web pages where media is published, the system would display its media type, length, bitrate, framerate, whatever.  Then of course we’d be adding by hand other metadata like title, subject, author, keywords, description, etc as we add media content to the website.  Ideally, the system would be able to automatically read ID3 tags, MXF, and EXIF metadata for both technical and descriptive information.  The idea is to automate the capturing of metadata as much as possible.

For web pages, we’d probably want to display mostly descriptive metadata, and not things like sampling rate, bit depth, color format, etc.

But for RSS feeds we need some of that technical metadata like filesize and mimetype.

And here’s the good part: If we capture enough information about our media objects, we can easily express it as “shareable metadata” via PBCore-compliant XML, and other standard schema.  So the CMS becomes a powerful tool for creating a large index of public media.  We can then write applications to search that index at a very fine level of detail.  Think Technorarti only focused entirely on media objects expressed as detailed XML records.

At WILL we currently catalog media objects (as I call them) using our CMS, but there’s no automatic extraction of anything.  We have to key in all the data.  But once that’s done, the output looks like this:

http://will.illinois.edu/metadata/pbcore/pf2008-04-17-a

Seems to me this is the beginning of a system-wide super API that doesn’t depend on any central organization, and is truly open source.

Existing open source PHP functions for automated metadata extraction could be integrated in a Drupal-like CMS.  The PHP ID3 function allows for reading and manipulating ID3 tags; the PHP Exif Functions can extract all kinds of metadata from JPEGs and TIFFs.  Similar functions may already exist for video files.

If we have a CMS that understands how to read existing metadata from the digital objects we feed it, we’re half-way to building an online digital asset management system.  More on that in Part Two…

Jack Brighton

Just got off the phone with Seth Gotlieb (formerly of optaros.com, now at contenthere.net ) he had presented at IMA2007 as part of the discussion on choosing a cms.

Seth had some great advice that helped me form my thinking about how I should proceed as a technologist as well as how the folks rallying together at pubforge.org might best proceed as a group.

As someone who has built a good part of a station site using a particular brand of open source technologies (let’s say, I’ve chosen to drive our station around in the open source equivalent of a Ford), I will be facing a decision, given that there seems to be some considerable intertia in the Chevy camp. But now may not be the time to jump from one moving car to another, at least not yet.

Seth suggested that some good first steps would be for us to:

• Identify group of stations (or individuals) who are willing to work together around a specific (technology) or goal.
• Arrange for a week-long training session for the group in a single physical location. Either decide which city you would like to hold this as a group, or decide the city based on where the training is being held. (For plone users, he suggested contacting Joel Burton about a Plone Bootcamp — for drupal users, he suggested talking with Jeff Robbins at lullabot.com).

He went on to say that the benefit of getting together in the same place would:

• be an indicator of commitment - those who would be willing to travel would be more invested
• Getting out of the office would allow us to focus better
• It would be an opportunity to forge bonds socially and increase networking opportunities

He suggested we identify which projects are currently in development (such as the drupal stations modules project, or find/start a broadcasting equivalent to the ploneforartists project). He suggested we identify which aspects of these projects we would like to see improved or added upon. He suggested that we could add an economy of scale by either collaborating on code as a group, or by pooling our cash to pay for additions to the codebase.

He suggested that we check into the pricepoints for training. If we have x number of participants, what will it cost us?

He suggested, in looking for people who would be willing to attend the training, that we should start with the folks who initially put the module together, for instance the drupal station modules were originally designed for KPSU, a college radio station in Portland, Oregon. Maybe this station would be a good place to start with a partnership, and then look outward from there.

I guess that leads to the question, is there a listing of folks from the latest IMA conference who were interested in using Drupal, Plone or alfresco (or perhaps frameworks such as jboss or ruby, or django — or even closed source cms’ like Jack Brighton’s work with expression engine) the list goes on? Do you think such a list should be put together at pubforge.org?

To get a better idea how these discussions might be beneficial to Seth in his work, I asked “what was in it for him?” He replied that he wanted to keep tabs on the progress of these initiatives, that he would be interested in helping us form an organization, for helping us decide how such an entity would be structured, and how we are going to go about making decisions. His emphasis is in identifying the requirements for a product, in product selection, in enabling developers to work together and enabling companies work together using collaborative techniques / open source tools. Perhaps we’ll draw on his expertise again further down the road?

Tags: beyondbroadcast, ima2007, opensourcebroadcasting, pubforge

P.S. I did not realize that the blog at pubforge.org was setup, so I had posted this at the old site at webresources.org. Here are some comments on this post that we’ll want to move over here as well:

Jeff Robbins Says:

I heard my name mentioned and I figured I’d say “hello!” Yes, if you’ve got any questions or need help, we’d be happy to point you in the right direction and/or help you out directly. I’ve got a lot of interest in audio and broadcasting and we use many of the modules that Andrew Morton has written for KPSU on Lullabot.com.

Tim Olson Says:
Perhaps there is an upcoming developer conference/training that is focused on one of those (Ruby on Rails, Plone..) that we could tie this to?