The Advene project aims at providing a model and a format to share annotations about digital video documents (movies, courses, conferences...), as well as tools to edit and visualize the hypervideos generated from both the annotations and the audiovisual documents. Teachers, moviegoers, etc. can use them to exchange multimedia comments and analyses about video documents.
The data model supporting the Advene application offers, in addition to the annotation storage itself, an explicitation of their structure (through notions of schema and annotation type), as well as an explicit view concept (templates applied on data to produce hypervideos) and queries.
Collaborations with other partners like IRI during the Cinelab project (2007-2008) led us to identify weaknesses in the first version of the data model, and to propose an evolution addressing these issues. This document specifies the new model and format, used for exchanging audiovisual metadata among Cinelab project partners, and more widely as a storage and exchange format for various applications (especially Advene and Lignes de temps). The Cinecast projet (2009-2012) allowed us to confront these evolutions to new application fields and other partners, and validate their relevance.
The following documents constitute the reference specification for the Cinelab data model and the associated file formats.