Digital Audiovisual Archives

Chapter 9

Tracing Video Usage: The Potential of VDI ¹

9.1. Introduction

Modern-day information society relies on increasing the number of digital resources. Music, films, software, and sensitive personal data (bank accounts, medical records, billing etc.) are stored and moved everywhere as digital files and broadcasted in their own formats. Designed to route information between computers, the Internet is rapidly evolving into an Internet of Things¹ where services, media, and Real World Objects (RWOs) (e.g. products, people and places²) and their corresponding data are uniquely identified. In the context of this new Internet, the main interest is no longer machines but content. At present, the content management solutions are proprietary, noninteroperable, and restricted to certain types of information. Hence, there is an increasing need for more effective means of managing and organizing information resources, ensuring their traceability and the ability to search and filter them, as well as to copy, protect, and synchronize them while guaranteeing their integrity and controlling access to them and their usage.

Convergence, a European 7th FP collaborative research project³ aims to enhance the Internet using a publish-subscribe service model which is focused on the content and is based on a common container for all kinds of digital data, including people and RWOs. This common container, called Versatile Digital Item (VDI) is a structured package composed of digital data and meta-information ...