1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to processing and configuring data in computing systems. More specifically, it relates to creating and storing semantic metadata for videos in computing systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Over the last several years, the volume of videos has increased nearly exponentially, a large contributor being various Web 2.0 online sites, such as YouTube, Flickr, and many others. These sites allow users to upload their own videos and share them with the public. Of course, before such sites became popular and people created their own personal or home-type videos, there were a large number of videos from professional and private sources. These included movies, TV shows, news programs, documentaries, instructional videos, institutional videos, and the list continues. As a result, there is now a huge and formidable body of videos available to the public today.
However, this growth has been viral and occurred without much structure or organization. Some of the more professional sources, like TV and cable networks, movie studios, and news organizations may have some type of scheme or structure when organizing their video content, but the vast majority of personal or, more generally, non-professionally-sourced videos, are not placed in a detailed index or an existing structure in a meaningful way; essentially they are created, tagged with a brief, informal description (typically, a few words) and posted online. Many individuals creating short videos often do not want to spend much time thinking about metadata, attributes, topic types, and so on. A quickly derived title and maybe one or two “keywords” or tags often seem sufficient as far as the maker of the video is concerned. Tags, titles, and descriptions are sometimes associated with the videos, but there's no standard way of providing these. As a result, searching videos has become somewhat haphazard and random.
A searcher is never certain whether she has found all or most of the truly relevant videos. Furthermore, interesting relationships, similarities, and other indirect connections between videos are missed. Thus, a searcher may find a few relevant videos in her search, but may miss a significant number of videos directly “on point” and will likely not see many videos that have some interesting relationship to the subject being searched or to the identified videos. The reasons for this are varied, but they essentially stem from the lack of a common way to tag or provide metadata for videos when they are created and stored. To cite one example, a video creator may provide a topic name such as “South Africa” but may not specify that the topic type is “location” or “country,” or other attributes, such as history, cuisine, travel, and the like. Or if such an attribute is provided, it may be inherent in the title, such as “Budget Travel in South Africa,” or “South Africa, Economic Statistics” and so on.