TEMS has published a piece on a problem the whole sector recognises: metadata that is inconsistent, incomplete or hard to reuse. Workflows are fragmented, and value is lost along the way, not because the data was never created but because it does not survive the journey between systems.
The article looks at three situations. For news agencies, the concern is that rights data and source information can be lost or altered as content moves between systems, precisely the fields that decide what may be done with a piece later. For broadcasters, archives spanning decades sit across several systems with descriptions that were never harmonised, which makes what they hold hard to navigate. For producers, the same production data is re-entered again and again for funding bodies, distributors and platforms, each with its own reporting demands.
The aim TEMS sets out is a more connected audiovisual environment, where content can be found, understood and reused with greater confidence. The point is operational as much as cultural: less duplicated effort day to day, and a better chance that works stay findable long after the people who made them have moved on.
TAMIS is the audiovisual production trial of TEMS, and this is the problem it works on: metadata created once at the source, attached to a single identifier, and kept intact as the work passes from hand to hand.
TEMS is co-funded by the European Union under the Digital Europe Programme, Grant Agreement No 101123423, and led by the Innovalia Association.
Source: Unlocking the potential of Europe’s audiovisual metadata, TEMS.
