A universal framework for managing metadata in the distributed Dragon Slayer system

In the multimedia field, metadata are becoming increasingly important for efficiently cataloguing the abundant flood of information. (Metadata are data on information structures.) The number of electronic data files made accessible by metadata increases rapidly, however at the present retrieving textual, audio, video and/or mixed data files through metadata is definitely restricted. In particular, there is only a limited number of metadata formats at hand. Nevertheless, within the framework of testbeds, some efforts have been made not only to develop retrieval systems adjusted to the respective field of application, but also to unite several metadata formats into one system in order to obtain better search results. This paper describes specifications for developing an attribute service which, as part of the "Dragon Slayer" distributed file system, is intended to offer a uniform platform for different metadata formats, and to offer efficient information metadata retrieval. Via the interface provided by the Dragon Slayer file system, the user can assign metadata to files and reference them via these metadata. For each metadata format used, an external meta module is incorporated into the file system which, depending on its format, manages and searches for metadata in a database, according to their format.