Crosswalk at the National Zoo, Washington, D.C.

A proposed crosswalk between Exif, IPTC, XMP and established Visual Resources schema

This is a work in progress.  It uses elements approved by IPTC, Adobe, Microsoft and The Metadata Working Group for photo software.  My goal is to see how elements from the Visual Resources community can be mapped into JPEG and TIFF elements so that embedded metadata can be read by the majority of popular photo software, including image editing and management applications as well as Windows and Apple operating systems.

With Adobe's XMP, it is possible to embed several schemas in parallel, so the VRA, CDWA and ARTstor cores can all coexist peacefully beside Exif, IPTC and Dublin Core.  Why bother mapping to professional and consumer photo fields such as Exif and IPTC?  Because, many common applications only read those fields, they cannot yet interpret custom xmp schemas.

Many elements from visual resource schemas still need to be worked out.

The crosswalk has been moved to Google Docs so that others can collaborate on it.  You can view the spreadsheet without a Google account here.  If you would like to help edit the crosswalk, contact Greg Reser, grese@ucsd.edu for permission.