Metadata panel at Frankfurter Buchmesse co-hosted by the IMZ

In the course of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the IMZ co-hosted a panel on the relevance of metadata for product visibility as part of the European innovation project “Digital Cross Over”.

The panel “Digital Cross Over x FBM: Driving Discoverability through Metadata” took place on 16 October and gave the stage to speakers from various creative industries to discuss how discoverability of content is a challenge across all sectors. This becomes even more relevant as the amount of available content is already overwhelming and constantly growing in our digital world.

All agreed that metadata plays an important role in existing and future initiatives to give customers orientation and make content discoverable which otherwise might remain unseen. Open metadata standards enable all content producers – from small independent creators to large companies – to describe their products which then directly influences chances to be found and fulfilling customers’ needs. However, metadata standards must not only be established, but also find their way to channels where customers can discover the related content. After initial insights into the current state of metadata driven discoverability, the challenges that come with that have been discussed.

Although the data has been recorded in all sectors for ages, it is only now that players are realizing how crucial good-quality metadata is – not only across sectors but even within one and the same industry. Lorena presented how we, at the IMZ, have taken on solving the issue for the film industry. Together with experts from IMZ Member Companies a new IMZ Metadata Standard has been developed and will be put to the test and rolled out together with the IMZ Online Services, another digitalisation project led by the IMZ.

Though each sector has different types of relevant data and different ways of handling the matter, in the end all face similar challenges. We look forward to keeping in touch with the extended network on metadata we have tapped in on and adding our contribution to the general solution of metadata standards for film.


The expert speakers from different content sectors (publishing, games, music and audiovisual) were:
Lorena Mazuré Loos, Project Manager, International Music + Media Centre, Austria
Luc Moser, Head of Label & New Business, EuroArts Music, Germany
Isabelle Reusa, Director, Video Museum, France
Dirk Hofmann, CEO, Co-Founder DAIN Studios, Germany
Anjo Schwarz, Product Manager, MVB GmbH

The moderator was:
Ronald Schild, CEO, MVB GmbH