CEPIC Congress Malta 2008 hosts 2nd International Photo Metadata Conference

... organized by IPTC and IFRA

Berlin, Germany, Mar. 11, 2008. Within the framework of the CEPIC Congress 2008 in Malta, IPTC and IFRA are organizing the 2nd International Photo Metadata Conference that will address the questions of "Metadata for Better Business". The conference will be held on Thursday 5 June 2008, from 09.30 H - 17.00 H.

"Metadata is critical to photo business by providing important information about the image and by describing it properly and that's why we have been cooperating very closely with IPTC in the recent years", states Alan Smith, the CEPIC President. "The maximum added value will only be achieved if the metadata are precise and reliable. But how can we apply metadata to avoid ambiguity and misunderstandings among our customers?"

The event is organised by IPTC and by IFRA and hosted by CEPIC. After the success of the first international Conference in Florence in June 2007, this event focusing exclusively on photo metadata will again in 2008 bring together major players from the photo business: creator and users, from freelance photographers to photo editors of global news providers; prominent maintainers of photo metadata standards; and the makers of cameras and imaging software.

"It is important that Metadata provide information about each picture and the copyrightowner. It is more and more difficult to prove who is the right copyrightowner when there is a dispute and the matter turns up in court", says Staffan Teste, chairman of the technical committe of Cepic and the Committee Member that represents CEPIC in IPTC.

"In the new IPTC-fields there is a new field with unique ID-information about each picture. Something that people in the business have been longing for many years. We are glad that IPTC and IFRA are helping the picture industry in those matters".

Conference Program overview
The Photo Metadata Conference will demonstrate improving your business through the proper use of metadata by discussing several key issues, notably

• "Keywording versus Controlled Vocabularies": Where can the more flexible keywords prevail and in which cases terms from controlled vocabularies support your business better.
• User interface support for metadata input : Machine helps humans - this should also be the case for metadata input. But where do current software products fall short of this goal and what are good examples of input support by a user interface.
• Identifying photos : Each photographer and every photo library wants to clearly indicate: "This is my photo". But there are different ways to achive this and potentially still some way to go for globally working photo registries.

Further the Photo Metadata Conference will follow up what has been achieved since last year's conference: the first public presentation of the refurbished IPTC Core and a new IPTC Extended set of photo metadata and a presentation from the North American Stock Photo Artists Association on their project to improve metadata proficiency of photographers.

More information about the Conference is available from:

http://www.iptc.org/phmdc/index2008.php.

All other information is available from www.cepic.org.

 

About CEPIC

CEPIC, Coordination of European Picture Agencies Press Stock Heritage, was founded in 1993 to have a unified representation in light of new legislation emerging from Brussels. Registered as an EEIG (Economic European Interest Group) in Paris in 1999 and achieving observer status at WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) in 1997, as the first organisation within the picture industry to do so, CEPIC now represents 1,053 picture agencies and photo libraries in 18 countries across Europe, both within and outside the European Union. Also a member of IPTC since 2005, CEPIC's membership includes large and smaller stock photo libraries, major photo news agencies, art galleries and museums.

About IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) www.iptc.org

The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. Information on all IPTC standards such as the Photo Metadata shemas, news exchange formats like NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2, NITF and IIM and the NewsCodes together with a list of existing members and information on how to join is available at http://www.iptc.org

About IFRA

IFRA is the worldwide research and service organisation for the news publishing industry. More than 3000 members in about 70 countries are members. IFRA's roots are in newspaper technology. In addition, it has firmly established itself in the areas of organisation and process optimisation.
Founded in 1961, at a time when European publishers began to introduce the use of colour in newspapers, IFRA since has broadened its focus dramatically and currently deals with all issues related to the production of newspapers and to new media as well as media strategy and business models.