*Attendees*
Jim DeRoest, U. Washington/Research Channel (chair)
Ann West, Internet2/Educause
Lisa Hogeboom, Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Jeanette Fielden, Internet2

*Discussion*

VoD future directions discussion:
The discussion continued from the last two calls with regard to what work the VoD group should focus on going forward. Should it remain an independent working group focusing on the AMIA/Library of Congress project and/or aspects of Research Channel's work? Or should it become a project under another working group?

Grace Agnew and Jim DeRoest received an NSF grant to do a directory and video registry for the Library of Congress and AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists - www.amianet.org). ViDe (www.vide.net) and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL – www.nsdl.org) are also involved. There's been a lot of work on developing a schema to describe directory collections and Jim's group will implement the directory. Grace has also proposed a mapping between all the various schema standards under consideration for the AMIA project, including Dublin Core and MPEG-7. Additionally she will work on schema proposed and make it ISO 11179 compliant and work on having it registered.
Jim talked about the interaction he had at Supercomputing 2002 with a number of representatives from organizations such as: NIH, NLM, NASA, NSF, Institute of Museums, Howard Hughes Institute, etc. He indicated that there was a lot of interest from the attendees in video middleware and how they can participate in VoD. The Library of Congress was there and seemed satisfied with AMIA project work that has occurred. Other institutions who weren't part of that effort were interested and wondering how they might participate. All were content holders looking for ways to widen their distribution. So there are lots of forces coming together that could really complement each other in the drive for common meta-data, cataloging and distribution standards, as well as creating broader opportunities for distribution. There is a lot of momentum in the AMIA project and it is at a point where the directory schema for collections is mostly finalized and a prototype will be ready sometime in early spring.

There have been discussions between the Internet2 applications group about Research Channel's working group, about potentially tying it closer to Internet2 since Research Channel was initially formed as a working group under the Internet2 applications group. Research Channel usually holds its member meeting in conjunction with the Internet2 member meetings and a number of their members will be at the Internet2 spring member meeting. There will be an effort to get Research Channel members and Internet2 members together at the spring member meeting for a VoD/DRM strategy session. ViDe is having it's workshop on digital video near the end of March, and it might be a second opportunity to get people together for a discussion.
[AI] Ann will provide information to Jim on dates to set up a meeting or track session.
[AI] Jim will coordinate setting up a discussion at the Internet2 spring member meeting and/or at the ViDe workshop.

One question is where is the dividing line between applications and middleware? Research Channel receives lots of requests for best practices in the VOD world. Questions like what's the best process and applications for encoding, how do you develop scalable streaming services etc? There are also questions about controlling access and logistics of serving though most institutions are not far enough along in the process that they are worrying about managing access yet. There are question on access control from the collections Research Channel is putting up mostly in the realm how to federate the administration of those collections so support is distributed and people want to be able to set up group access for administrative control. So the logical dividing point might be that access belongs in middleware and best practices in serving streaming video cookbook effort might fit best in a Research Channel working group under the Internet2 applications group.

The proposal for discussion is: Is it appropriate to refocus the VoD group on the AMIA project going forward?

*Action Items*
[AI] Ann will provide information to Jim on dates to set up a meeting or track session.
[AI] Jim will coordinate setting up a discussion at the Internet2 spring member meeting and/or at the ViDe workshop.