Metadata Guidelines

Author: Jim Taylor, DECE

Content Providers are strongly urged to follow these guidelines to provide a consistent experience for UltraViolet users.

General

• Don't use all caps
• TitleDisplay19 is deprecated and can be left blank.
• Don't include OriginalTitle unless it's different than TitleDisplay60.
• Add TitleDisplayUnlimited if the title is longer than 60 characters.
• Summary190 and Summary400 are required. Add Summary4000 if you have a summary longer than 400 characters.

Sorting

• Don't move articles ("The", "A", "An", etc.) to the end of the title. This is what the TitleSort field is for.
  • Example: Title60 = "The Hangover Part II", TitleSort = “Hangover Part 2, The”
  • (Note that the official text is "Part II" but "Part 2" is used in titleSort to ensure correct numerical sorting)
• For correct sorting with TitleSort
  • Move articles to the end or just omit them. ("Fisher King, The" and "Fisher King" sort equivalently.)
  • Remove leading punctuation
  • Use leading zeroes for episode numbers and season numbers in TitleSort (but not in TitleDisplay60 and TitleDisplayUnlimited). It’s ok to use abbreviations for seasons and episodes as long as they’re consistent.
    • Example: TitleSort = “Simpsons, The S001 E01” or TitleSort = “Simpsons S093 E12”
  • Use Arabic numbers in TitleSort instead of alternative forms don't sort correctly.
    • Example: "Part 8", "Part 9", "Part 10", instead of "Part VIII", "Part IX", "Part X". "Season 2", "Season 3" instead of "The Complete Second Season", "The Complete Third Season".
• Library views by Retailers and others should use TitleSort with case-insensitive sorting, but it's still recommend that you not use all caps in the TitleSort field to avoid problems with poor implementations.

Series, Seasons, and Episodes

• Don’t repeat the series title in the season title, and don’t repeat the series or season title in the episode title. Library view implementations are expected to properly show series/season titles. 
  • Example: Series = “House of Cards”, Season = “Season 3”, Episode = “Chapter 8”
• For RunLength of a series or season you can either use 0 or you can add up the RunLength of all the child elements.
• For ReleaseYear of a season use the year the first episode of the season was released. For ReleaseYear of a series use the year the first episode was released.
• See Asset IDs, Content Structure, Metadata, and Bundles for additional information about episodic content structure.

Localization/Localisation

• Put the original (untranslated) title in OriginalTitle. Leave OriginalTitle blank for the native language. In other words, don't duplicate TitleDisplay60 in OriginalTitle.
• Use DECE's recommended localized genres (see Genres).
• Don't localize to language subtags such as en-US, en-UK, en-AU, etc. unless there are differences in the text in usage or spelling. I.e., a summary containing the word "localized" and "program" might be localized to "en" at the root level with a version using "localise" and "programme" for en-UK, en-IE, en-AU, en-NZ, and perhaps en-CA (depending on your outlooque).
• It's ok to localize in more languages than those supported in current UltraViolet territories. The Coordinator supports all standard language tags.

Genres

• Use DECE's recommended genres (see Genres)

ArtReference (Cover Art)

• Retailers are guaranteed six standard cover art images, small, medium, and large, in two aspect ratios. You can supply all six images or you can supply one or both large images and let the Coordinator scale and pad as needed to generate the remaining images.
  • Standard image sizes: 96x144, 192x288, 800x1200 (0.67 aspect ratio); 112x160, 224x320, 840x1200 (0.70 aspect ratio)
• You may provide images in additional sizes and aspect ratios as needed by your retailers.
• Cover art with text should be localized within the same <LocalizedInfo> tag as text.