ENHANCED DATABASE SCHEME TO SUPPORT ADVANCED MEDIA PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION

• US 20100088311A1
• Filed: 04/03/2008
• Published: 04/08/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 04/13/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Grass Valley Canada (Belden Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Gvbb Holdings SARL (Vislink Technologies, Inc.)
• Inventors: Durand, Cassiano, Reiner, Wilfried, Du Fosse, Eric
• Granted Patent: US 8,868,615 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/722
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/22 Indexing; Data structures therefor; Storage structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/27 Replication, distribution or synchronisation of data between databases or within a distributed database system; Distributed database system architectures therefor
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/48 Retrieval characterised by using metadata, e.g. metadata not derived from the content or metadata generated manually
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results

Abstract

An enhanced database system and method for media production and distribution enables the aggregation of assets using external unique IDs. The use of the external IDs allows the searching of Media Asset Management database to be performed without any prior knowledge of the actual database. The search configuration defines a set of search environment parameters that are imported into the search database during a configuration stage and which are used by the search services to provide client applications with an interface to create, validate, and execute queries.

Claims

1. A method comprising the steps of:

encapsulating into at least one asset an identifier for a corresponding application associated with each asset; and

querying the at least one asset for a given application using said identifier for that application to identify the at least one asset associated with the identifier.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the encapsulating comprises:

assigning a unique ID as the identifier to each asset.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein the encapsulating further comprises forming an asset table in a database using the identifier for each asset.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein the querying comprises:

defining at least one search environment parameter; and

importing the at least one defined parameter into a search database during configuration of the search.

5. The method according to claim 3, where said forming further comprises establishing a virtual asset address within the database using the identifier.

6. The method according to claim 4, wherein said defining of at least one search environment parameter comprises identifying a description of metadata corresponding the at least one asset.

7. The method according to claim 1, further comprising identifying metadata associated with the at least one asset, wherein at least one query is dynamically created for a database using metadata descriptions.

8. A method comprising the step of:

synchronizing search results from at least two data sources in response to a user search query;

establishing a search configuration in response to the user search query

aggregating the synchronized search results from the at least two data sources, said aggregating including assigning an identifier for each application corresponding to a respective asset; and

presenting the aggregated search results to the user as one search result.

9. The method according to claim 8, wherein said aggregating further comprises:

forming an asset table in a database by encapsulating the assigned identifier for each application.

10. The method according to claim 8, wherein said establishing comprises defining search environment parameters involved in the search,

11. The method according to claim 10, further comprising importing the search environment parameters into a search database during configuration of the search in response to the search query to provide client applications an interface to create, validate and execute the search query.

12. The method according to claim 10, wherein said defining comprises identifying metadata descriptions associated with each asset, wherein the user search query is dynamically created for a database using the metadata description during the establishing of the search configuration.

13. The method according to claim 9, wherein the forming further comprises establishing a virtual asset address within the database using the identifier.

14. A computer program product comprising a computer useable medium having computer readable program code embodied thereon for use in media production and distribution environment, the computer program product comprising:

program code for encapsulating into at least one asset an identifier for a corresponding application associated with the at least one asset; and

program code for querying the at least one asset for a given application using said identifier for that application to identify the at least one asset associated with the identifier.

15. The computer program product of according to claim 14, wherein the program code for encapsulating further comprises program code for assigning a unique ID as the specific identifier to each asset.

16. The computer program product according to claim 14, wherein the program code for encapsulating further comprises program code for forming an asset table in a Media Asset Management database using the specific identifier for the at least one asset.

17. The computer program product according to claim 14, wherein the program code for querying further comprises:

program code for defining at least one search environment parameter; and

program code for importing the at least one parameter into a search database during configuration of the search.