CoMet

The standardization of comic metadata (information describing a comic) is intended to make it easier for collectors, creators, publishers, distributors, and retailers to share information about comics across programs, platforms, and devices.

Currently programs, web sites, databases, and applications all use their own naming schema for describing comic books. This makes it difficult, particularly for newcomers, to get comics into software programs or web sites they wish to use to track their collections. It becomes even more complicated when users wish to share or move information about their collections across platforms (i.e. PC to iPad), between software programs, or packaged as comic book archives (typically CBR or CBZ files).

Title continuity is handled differently depending on where you look. ComicBookDB.com lists three different “Issue 1” for Fantastic Four (1961, 1982, 1996). cbdb.com lists one issue from 1961, and no mention of issue 1 from the new “volumes” of later years.

In addition, the syntax used between systems is not consistent. One system may have fields that are granular in natures (e.g. “letterer” as a refinement of “artist”). Another system may only refer to general “contributor” with no distinction between “artist” or “writer”, and yet another may not offer the field at all.

Standardizing the metadata used to describe comic books would provide a consistent way for users to represent each and every issue in their collection. Making it easier to record, share, sort, and organize their collections. An additional benefit is that all of this information becomes extremely portable. Easy to import and export across platforms, programs, and devices.

CoMet is based on XML because of its generality and simplicity, and because XML documents are likely to adapt well to future technologies and uses. XML also provides well-defined rules for the syntax of documents, which decreases the cost to implementers and reduces incompatibility across systems. Further, XML is extensible: it is not tied to any particular type of document or set of element types, it supports internationalization, and it encourages document markup that can represent a document’s internal parts more directly, making them amenable to automated formatting and other types of computer processing.

The CoMet schema was created in order to provide a granular, yet simple, specification for describing comics. While there are many existing metadata specifications for the description of books and other resources, they include many attributes unrelate to comics, require reference to multiple supplemental sub-specifications to achieve granularity, and / or lack common comic descriptors entirely. That said, CoMet will utilize common element names from existing specifications where applicable.

CoMet is admittedly not the first attempt to develop a standard for specifying comic metadata. It does aspire to improve upon past proposals that appear to be abandoned or whose design limit their applicability. Some existing proposals have advocated storing metadata within the comment field of a particular compression mechanism such as ZIP. This would exclude users who prefer RAR compression. CoMet suggests storing metadata as a standalone XML file at the root of the archive folder. This allows the greatest portability and makes it accessible to a larger number of users.