Metadata Comparison

 Notes on Degrees of Support

In the table above, where Visual-Meta is listed as carrying metadata Automatically, it means that it can be automatically taken from the manuscript document and appended as metadata on export.

Not Standard means that it can be encoded though this is not standard practice and is therefore not available to view in standard PDF viewer software, nor straight forward to implement in software by developers.

Notes on Categories

Descriptive metadata is used to describe documents for cataloging and finding purposes and therefore needs to be done manually in all cases, as does Usage Rights though this can be done through boilerplates.

Structural metadata, specifically headings, is in the manuscript document but very few authoring software systems exports this as PDF metadata.
(Microsoft Word can accommodate turning headings into metadata, not Apple Pages)

Visual-Meta includes Connective metadata through including the full Reference section of the document, in a machine readable format, allowing for accurate citations maps to be viewed, instantly.

Similarly, Visual-Meta supports Contextual metadata in the form of Glossaries, which can be automatically generated based on the user’s own definitions.

Media metadata can also automatically be included, if the manuscript document ‘knows’ what the media is. For example, the table above where Visual-Meta and PDF with XMP metadata is compared, could be in Visual-Meta with the rows and columns defined for instant extraction of the values for interaction when reading a single document or a corpus of thousands.

Computational text in the document refers to Vint Cerf’s notion of text which can change based on user interaction or external circumstances, such as location or time.

Further metadata, such as Errata and XR, is experimental. In Visual-Meta it is, like all the metadata, described openly for easy parsing. These can be appended as separate appendices, leaving the original Visual-Meta in place and every time there is a change in the Errata, or the placement of objects from the document in XR space, these separate–temporary–appendices get updated.