Representing Digital Assets using MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration

TL;DR

This paper introduces the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration standard, an XML-based method for representing digital assets, highlighting its characteristics and potential application in digital libraries like LANL's aDORe repository.

Contribution

It provides an overview of MPEG-21 DID, its abstract model, XML syntax, and demonstrates its relevance to digital library systems, an area less explored in prior work.

Findings

MPEG-21 DID offers a flexible XML-based representation of digital assets.

The standard has potential applications in digital library repositories.

Demonstrated use case in LANL's aDORe system.

Abstract

Various XML-based approaches aimed at representing compound digital assets have emerged over the last several years. Approaches that are of specific relevance to the digital library community include the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), the IMS Content Packaging XML Binding, and the XML Formatted Data Units (XFDU) developed by CCSDS Panel 2. The MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration (MPEG-21 DID) is another standard specifying the representation of digital assets in XML that, so far, has received little attention in the digital library community. This article gives a brief insight into the MPEG-21 standardization effort, highlights the major characteristics of the MPEG-21 DID Abstract Model, and describes the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language (MPEG-21 DIDL), an XML syntax for the representation of digital assets based on the MPEG-21 DID Abstract Model. Also, it briefly demonstrates the potential relevance of MPEG-21 DID to the digital library community by describing its use in the aDORe repository environment at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for the representation of digital assets.