Metadata for photographs: From digital library to multimedia application

Abstract

This paper describes the production of an educational multimedia CD-ROM about French rural houses and farms, and how to renovate them without losing their traditional features. The educational message is illustrated with many photographs of non-renovated or renovated houses, and made explicit through comments and descriptions associated with the photos. The paper focuses on the XML metadata describing the photos and the use of this metadata for the automatic generation of Web pages. We first report on the usability of the Dublin Core for interoperable photographs metadata, together with more detailed XML descriptions to support a specific multimedia application. We then show how to generate the Web pages by defining HTML document prescriptions which embed queries to the XML metadata, using Norfolk, a virtual document generator. The approach can be used in various applications ranging from personal virtual photo albums to complex virtual museum.