System demonstration: Metavid.org: a social website and open archive of congressional video

We have developed Metavid.org, a site that archives video footage of the U.S. Senate and House floor proceedings. Visitors can search for who said what when and also download, remix, blog, edit, discuss, and annotate transcripts and metadata. The site has been built with Open Source Software (OSS) and the video is archived in an OSS codec (Ogg Theora). We present a walk through of the architecture of Metavid and highlight two aspects of its design: (1) open standards; and, (2) Wiki functionality. First, open standards allow Metavid to function both as a platform, on top of which other sites can be built, and as a resource for "mashing." For example, Voterwatch.org pulls its video from the Metavid archive. Second, Metavid extends the MediaWiki software (which is the foundation of Wikipedia) into the domain of collaborative video authoring. This extension allows closed-captioned text or video sequences to be collectively edited. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Inform...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DGO
• Authors: Michael Dale, Abram Stern, Mark Deckert, Warren Sack
• Keywords: DGO 2007, DGO 2009, Ogg Theora, Open Source Software, Open Standards