Microsoft Does RDF
From Danny Ayers, news that Microsoft will be supporting embedded RDF metadata in the Windows Vista Photo Gallery. They will do this using Adobe’s XMP.
As the project manager explains:
XMP is an extensible framework for embedding metadata in files that was developed by Adobe, and is the foundation for our “truth is in the file†goal. All metadata written to photos by Windows Vista will be written to XMP (always directly to the file itself, never to a ‘sidecar’ file). When reading metadata from photos on Windows Vista, we will first look for XMP metadata, but if we don’t find any, we’ll also look for legacy EXIF and IPTC metadata as well. If we find legacy metadata, we’ll write future changes back to both XMP and the legacy metadata blocks (to improve compatibility with legacy applications).Elsewhere, in comments, the same person explains this part of a comprehensive metadata approach:
“Truth in the file” is a principle that applies to all document types in Vista, not just photos. For photos, metadata is written back to an XMP block in the file. XMP is an industry standard for imaging metadata that was developed by Adobe.
A few quick comments:
- Adobe did not “develop” XMP per se; they simply borrowed pieces of RDF. It’s surprising to me that MS of all companies is accepting this sort of marketing uncritically. Everything that is good about XMP is in fact directly a consequence of it being based on RDF, which is an open standard developed by the W3C. Of course, at least some of what’s wrong with XMP (like the funky syntax) is also a consequence of RDF (or more precisely, the particular choices Adobe made in subsetting it back around 2000 or so).
- They seem to have a smart strategy for compatibility
- Good to see them have a comprehensive metadata strategy based on file-level metadata (as opposed, say, to OS-level)
