The DIG35 Initiative Group is circulating for comment a Draft of Version 1.1 of their metadata specificiation for digital images. See http://www.digitalimaging.org/i_dig35.html

This extensive XML-based proposal standard allows the specification of content metadata, colorimetric metadata including ICC color profiles of the imaging system and characterization of the illuminant, intellectual property rights (IPR), history of the image, capture data including GPS data,...

This is very cool stuff, from a group whose members include Adobe, Agfa, Kodak, Fujifilm, Canon, HP, and Microsoft.

Look into this if you are publishing images and want such things down the road as:

-distributed catalog access -remote color rendering with a high likelyhood looking like the original -standardized IPR so that micropayment software can pay you everytime somebody uses your image -ease of software comparison of your image to someone else's -....

Don't look into this if:

- 200+ standards proposals turn you off - You want to wait until somebody builds the applications that make use of standards and then you want to not care about the standards, just the applications - You think XML is an American TV wrestling organization