2008 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

Four to Five Years: Deep Tagging

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
Deep tagging is a way to access the content buried within rich media like video, podcasts, Flash applets, and even images. With deep tagging, a component of a larger piece of media can be identified and labeled — tagged — according to what it is about, who is featured, or other relevant information for more precise searching and finding. Deep tagging as a technology is still in development; while there are a few proprietary solutions that show promise, the realization of easy deep tagging for most online media content is several years away. At the same time, the essential challenges are being solved as this is written, and adoption of this technology will happen quickly once that happens. As development continues, the technology’s implications for just-in-time content delivery, remixing and reuse will undoubtedly prove to be of great value for education.

Overview

Tagging, the practice of attaching a descriptive word or phrase to a piece of online content for the purpose of linking it to other related content, has become a mainstream activity. A vision for the next generation of tagging is deep tagging, which would allow people to create a direct link to a small part of a larger piece of media, such as an image or a video. Others who search for those tags would be able to retrieve specific content via these tags, with the promise of facilitating just-in-time learning and creating new possibilities for research and scholarly work.

Currently, development efforts in deep tagging fall into three categories. The first is proprietary collections of materials that have been tagged for the purpose of selling the content. Collections of deep-tagged media facilitate research by making it easier to discover relevant segments of longer video clips, as in the case of old television or news broadcasts or recorded lectures and performances. Drawbacks of this type of service are that it can be expensive and the sources are limited to those the company chooses to archive. Critical Mention (http://www.criticalmention.com/web/overview.php) is one service that hosts a tagged archive of news broadcasts.

A second application of deep tagging allows users to upload and tag their own videos and other media, creating customized collections that may be linked to and shared. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) has offered deep tagging of images for some time — when an image is uploaded, the owner can select a portion of it and label it with a text annotation. If the owner permits, others who view the image may add annotations as well. While this type of service is more flexible in that users can upload their own content, it results in collections of videos that are tied to the service — if the company disappears, so does the hosting — and that must be viewed on the service’s site rather than on the user’s. Sites that offer uploading and deep tagging services for personal videos include Deeptagging (http://en.deeptagging.com), VeoTag (http://www.veotag.com) and Viddler (http://www.viddler.com). YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) now offers deep linking, but not tagging, to any point within any video on the site using a time code embedded in the hyperlink.

The third application of deep tagging is the least developed. The vision here is that it will be easy to attach tags to any part of any image or any place in a video or audio clip, the way viewers can now with Flickr image annotations. Existing methods for tagging video or audio in this way rely either on transcriptions or owner-added tags. Gotuit (http://www.gotuit.com) offers a software package that content producers can use to index and tag media prior to upload to make it easier to search; EveryZing (http://www.everyzing.com) uses transcriptions to create searchable indexes of a client’s content. Neither offers the ability for viewers to tag as they watch or listen. The next step in deep tagging, which has yet to be realized, is to develop tools that allow any viewer to add tags o any part of any image or any video or audio clip, wherever it may be found online.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

Although the technology behind deep tagging has been in development for several years, direct educational examples are few. It is not difficult to project uses for deep tagging, however. If the technology continues to develop over the next few years, deep tagging could increase the granularity of time-based media, allowing parts of media clips to be more easily remixed, linked, and reused.

Many disciplines could benefit from the resulting video and audio libraries that would be as easy to search and tag as text-based resources are now. Searches would turn up tagged brief but pertinent segments of longer videos that might otherwise be missed, providing just-in-time delivery of only the content that the searcher is looking for. Student portfolios and professional resumes could include an RSS feed for the parts of podcasts that include the featured person. And students reviewing a recorded course lecture or podcast while preparing for an exam could skip to just the parts they need the most.

Tagging within video and audio clips could also facilitate the organisation and description of rich media in social software environments and enable users to co-create content by annotating the media. Voicethread (http://www.voicethread.com) currently offers something similar; a media file is uploaded and viewers can leave comments in text, audio, video, or other media that remain attached to specific points in the original content. If deep tagging continues to mature, we could see tools that easily enable this kind of collaboration around content anywhere online.

While there are few educational examples of deep tagging in use today, a sampling of possible applications for deep tagging across disciplines might include the following:

• Cinematography and Film Studies Tags attached to specific points in cinema recordings could indicate the type of shot, lighting effects, blocking, or other strategies. Students could find precisely the point in a film demonstrating a given topic; exams could include untagged clips for students to label.
• Medicine Archival films could be tagged with diagnostic information to identify medically relevant details, such as examples of gait that indicate certain diseases or injuries. Films of surgical procedures could be annotated and tagged.
• Earth Sciences Films or simulations of physical processes could be annotated with information related to what the viewer is seeing: for instance, video clips of avalanches could be tagged with information that describes some of the fluid dynamics at play.

Examples of Deep Tagging

The following links provide examples of tools that currently support deep tagging within rich media.

EveryZing
http://www.everyzing.com
EveryZing provides a software solution for indexing, searching, and connecting multimedia content to search engines.

Gotuit
http://www.gotuit.com
Gotuit makes software to manage searching and finding in video libraries through deep tagging.

SWFAddress
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
SWFAddress is a tool that allows developers to insert tags in rich media for later linking or searching.

Viddler
http://www.viddler.com
Viddler is an online video sharing service that enables users to upload completed videos, record directly to the web with webcam, tag or comment specific points in the video, and share videos using RSS and iTunes.

For Further Reading

The following articles and resources are recommended for those who wish to learn more about deep tagging.

All the Cool Kids Are Deep Tagging
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/01/all-the-cool-kids-are-deep-tagging/
(Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, 1 October 2006.) Written when deep tagging was first introduced, this post discusses deep tagging and websites that offer it.

Audio Indexing: EveryZing’s New Video Player Points Towards the Future of Online Video
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/everyzings_speech_to_text_metaplayer.php
(Frederic Lardinois, ReadWriteWeb, 22 October 2008.) This article describes EveryZing’s video player that also allows users to search online videos using keywords and tags.

Deep Tag It
http://www.writetech.net/2007/03/deep_tag_it.html
(Michelle Lentz, WriteTechnology, 2 March 2007.) This blog post describes deep tagging, suggests ways to use tagged video, and describes a deep tagging product by Veotag.

Video Search Catches Up with Video Tagging
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624735
(Jeremy Lockhorn, ClickZ, 29 January 2007.) This article describes video tagging and outlines why it is useful, as well as identifying a few websites that offer video tagging.

YouTube Enables Deep Linking Within Videos
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/25/youtube-enables-deep-linking-within-videos/
(Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch, 25 October 2008.) This blog post describes a newly released feature on YouTube that enables users to link directly to a spot in any YouTube video by adding a time code tag to the link. Additionally, YouTube automatically links time codes mentioned in video comments to that point in the video.

del.icio.us: Deep Tagging
http://del.icio.us/tag/hzau08+deeptagging
(Australia–New Zealand Horizon Advisory Board and Friends, 2008.) Follow this link to find resources tagged for this topic and this edition of the Horizon Report, including the ones listed here. To add to this list, simply tag resources with “hzau08” and “deeptagging” when you save them to del.icio.us.

Related Tags: deep linking, tagging within rich media