Blockchain

At the 46th ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 meeting in Geneva (CH), 25-26 Jan. 2025 it has been revealed that the white paper on MPEG Smart Contracts for Media (ISO/IEC 21000-23) ranked 2nd most downloaded paper among MPEG white papers. A few months ago during the closing plenary of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 3 MPEG Systems in Sapporo (JP), 147th MPEG meeting, 15-19 July 2024 it has also been my honour to receive as lead project editor an ISO/IEC Excellence Award for the development of the ISO/IEC 21000-23 standard.

ISO/IEC 21000-23 Smart Contracts for Media has already enriched DLT environments with inference and reasoning capabilities inherently associated with ontologies bridging the interoperability gap towards a semantic media blockchain. Thus, it is greatly assisting media stakeholders in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLTs, while it is fully addressing media value chain provenance (who has done what on which content). It is also increasing media stakeholders’ trust in sharing high-value data (e.g., music rights) in the ecosystem.

Moreover, work has been initiated on ISO/IEC 23000-23 Decentralised Media Rights Application Format with aim to provide the means (e.g., APIs) towards enabling a fairer marketplace for rights holders and remuneration of authors and performers while rewarding human creativity in the AI era based on widely deployed MPEG technologies (e.g., audio-visual codecs, file formats, streaming protocols, and smart contracts) and non-MPEG technologies (e.g., DLTs, content and creator IDs). Such a decentralised media ecosystem has the potential to unlock both the Semantic Web and in turn the creative economy.

Thank you to all contributors and supporters to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 3 MPEG Systems Smart Contracts for Media Subgroup activities. Feel free to join us.

At the 46th ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 meeting in Geneva (CH), 25-26 Jan. 2025 it has been revealed that the white paper on MPEG Smart Contracts for Media (ISO/IEC 21000-23) ranked 2nd most downloaded paper among MPEG white papers. A few months ago during the closing plenary of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 3 MPEG Systems in Sapporo (JP), 147th MPEG meeting, 15-19 July 2024 it has also been my honour to receive as lead project editor an ISO/IEC Excellence Award for the development of the ISO/IEC 21000-23 standard.

ISO/IEC 21000-23 Smart Contracts for Media has already enriched DLT environments with inference and reasoning capabilities inherently associated with ontologies bridging the interoperability gap towards a semantic media blockchain. Thus, it is greatly assisting media stakeholders in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLTs, while it is fully addressing media value chain provenance (who has done what on which content). It is also increasing media stakeholders’ trust in sharing high-value data (e.g., music rights) in the ecosystem.

Moreover, work has been initiated on ISO/IEC 23000-23 Decentralised Media Rights Application Format with aim to provide the means (e.g., APIs) towards enabling a fairer marketplace for rights holders and remuneration of authors and performers while rewarding human creativity in the AI era based on widely deployed MPEG technologies (e.g., audio-visual codecs, file formats, streaming protocols, and smart contracts) and non-MPEG technologies (e.g., DLTs, content and creator IDs). Such a decentralised media ecosystem has the potential to unlock both the Semantic Web and in turn the creative economy.

 Thank you to all contributors and supporters to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 3 MPEG Systems Smart Contracts for Media Subgroup activities. Feel free to join us.

Considerations for new and emerging DLT and Blockchain Use Cases for ISO

For stakeholders involved in DLT and blockchain applications,  Use Cases provide a useful methodology to inform decision-makers of the new business opportunities, technical capabilities and insights into these new and emerging technologies.

ISO/TC 307 Blockchain and DLT Technologies  is currently undertaking a revision of the ISO Technical Report TR 3242:2022 which provides European and International examples of 22 use cases across Fintech, Smart Energy, Supply Chains and Data Provenance. These use cases help inform standards-makers, and provide shared learning to entrepreneurs and innovators that enables faster adoption and cross-domain applications.

For reference, you can access the Abstract and Bibliography List of the TR3242 Report for free. It provides an overview of the key countries, organizations, businesses and useful links on this ISO Link.

Collecting new Use Cases for ISO/TR 24878 New and emerging DLT/Blockchain Use Cases

We are collecting innovative new and emerging use cases that reflect the evolution and impact of this technology since the last report. The goal is to exemplify good DLT practices across international domains in the context of Web 3, Tokenization and other trends. 

Get involved by contacting us on this thread.

Regards Caroline Thomas, StandICT Fellow and Convenor of ISO/TC307 WG6 Uses Cases

Operation and management of telecommunication networks are increasingly difficult with the demands and behaviours of users exceeding the capacity of network engineers to keep pace. This has led to increased automation of the network, enabled by various forms of intelligent software. One such proposal from the ITU-T Focus Group on Autonomous Networks (standardization group) is an architecture (Y.AN-ARCH-FW) to achieve self-driven automation (i.e. autonomy) of network operation, whereby technology from different operators and third parties is self-assembled and deployed in production networks. This raises questions and challenges regarding transparency, auditability, and trust while maintaining interoperability.

This work presents an initial study of a distributed and decentralized marketplace to bring transparent and auditable trust to the proposed architecture without sacrificing interoperable functionality. The work demonstrated this by a proof of concept implementation of both the proposed architecture and marketplace based on the combination of Ethereum and IPFS.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10154327

https://github.com/FGAN-Digital-Twins/BC-AN

Towards enabling a fairer marketplace for rights holders and remuneration of authors and performers work has commenced on ISO/IEC 23000-23 Decentralized Media Rights Application Format standard with the aim to provide the means (e.g., APIs) based on widely deployed MPEG technologies (e.g., audio-visual codecs, file formats, streaming protocols, and smart contracts) and non-MPEG technologies (e.g., DLTs, content and creator IDs). This standard will greatly assist in achieving effective interoperability for decentralised music and media apps developed in the ecosystem. For further details see:

Short article:https://tinyurl.com/57tmxcd4 & Long article:https://tinyurl.com/3pe64wn8 

If you would like to get involved, then join our biweekly calls at https://tinyurl.com/2bbukxfs

1) Standard Specification: https://www.iso.org/standard/82527.html

2) Reference Software: https://tinyurl.com/mrdfzs9t

3) Demonstration (incl. videos): https://tinyurl.com/476dnrfj

4) White paper (incl. slides): https://tinyurl.com/2ne769wn

5) Short article: https://tinyurl.com/57tmxcd4

6) Join MPEG Smart Contracts for Media: https://tinyurl.com/2bbukxfs

As this is my first post on this forum, it is at the same time a quick update and a short Introduction on our work on ISC/CD 24138 on the International Standard Content Code at ISO/TC 46/SC 9 (Identification and description). Over the last months, working group 18 (WG 18), has been busy to match the scheduled timeline. Last week, the committee draft study/ballot was initiated successfully and in time. This means that after WG internal WD study, the working draft is now entering the stages to receive feedback and comments outside of our working group.

This positive development goes in line with a growing interest and adoption of the ISCC, especially in the context of web3 and NFT projects. But also traditional media sectors and industries (TV broadcasters, publishers, photographers, news and music industry) are investigating novel use cases supported by the ISCC system. 

The International Standard Content Code (ISCC) is an open, interoperable, identifier for digital media assets that use a combination of cryptographic and similarity-preserving hashes. This supports decentralised content identification and matching of same and similar/near-duplicate content. 

The ISCC can be used to identify digital assets of all media-types like text, image, audio and video in all granularities across all industry sectors alongside existing standard identifiers. Content published on the Internet, is dynamic, short- lived and granular, it “continuously re-encodes, resizes, and re-compresses, changing its underlying data as it travels through a complex network of actors and systems” (Titusz Pan). Therefore, unlike existing content-derived identifiers (like e.g., SHA256), as a multi-dimensional identifier the ISCC does not exclusively rely on the functionality of a cryptographic hash alone, but also uses similarity preserving hash functions (e.g., Simhash, Minhash) in the process of generating an ISCC.

The main distinguishing feature of the ISCC to other existing standardised content identifiers (e.g., ISBN, DOI, or ISRC) is the fact that the ISCC is generated from the content file itself. This means that an ISCC can be generated by anyone with access to the digital media asset, free of charge by using open-source software, without the need to exchange any external metadata beforehand. By using ISCC, anyone with access to digital content – it could be the original creator, a publisher, an intermediary, an online platform or a consumer – can decentrally generate the same (or similar) identifier from the same (or similar) digital media asset. This allows anyone to unambiguously identify the same or probabilistically match similar content independent of centralised organisations, registries or proprietary third-party services and software.

If ISCC codes are declared on public blockchain networks, creators and rightsholders can associate metadata, rights management information, credentials or other claims to the identifier. Consequently, anyone with access to the media asset will be able to reverse-lookup all information that may be associated with the identifier. 

ISCC codes are designed to be used in decentralised media environments and the web3. Decentralised content-derived identifiers support a large number of use cases that do not require the use of blockchain networks. In this sense, ISCC codes are perfectly suited to bridge the shift of paradigm from web2 to web3, which we can observe in the media industries and elsewhere. 

If you have any questions about the ISCC, feel free to reach out. I will be happy to update you on the further developments in the coming weeks and months.

ISCC homepage: https://iscc.codes

ISO/CD 24138: https://www.iso.org/standard/77899.html

ISO/TC 46/SC 9: https://www.iso.org/committee/48836.html

Webinar series on a Decentralised Media Rights Ecosystem

by MPEG Systems Smart Contracts for Media Subgroup

Registration and further info 

References

1)     Decentralised Media Rights Ecosystem (Exploration)

2)     MPEG Smart Contracts for Media (ISO/IEC 21000-23)

Despite the fact that cryptocurrency remains one of the most well-known use cases for distributed ledger technology, ISO/TC 307 has so far not initiated any projects on decentralised finance or digital currencies.  Meanwhile, stablecoins have proliferated among new and existing providers of financial services, and central banks around the world have begun taking earnest steps toward deploying central bank digital currency (CBDC).  Standards are an important prerequisite for institutional adoption of any new technology, and these new technologies could form key infrastructure for the future of electronic payments.

New standards might soon be on the way.  This year, ISO/TC 307 has launched a new advisory group on digital currencies that shall explore the potential for new projects and initiatives in areas related to digital currencies, digital assets, and decentralised finance.  This advisory group is working in parallel to a corresponding advisory group launched by ISO/TC 68 Financial services.  Watch this space, and participate if you can!

I personally drafted an article on tokens and distributed ledger technology in payment systems to help researchers and the standardisation community make sense of what new technologies mean for the future of payments.  The community would like to hear your thoughts as well.
 

ISO/TC 307 is currently undertaking a revision on ISO 22739 Blockchain and distributed ledger technology - Vocabulary.  Proposed additions of new terms as well as proposed revisions and deletions of existing terms are under consideration.  ISO/TC 307 anticipates registering this revision as a Draft International Standard before the end of the autumn.  (Please note that it is possible for the public to view the entirety of the version of ISO 22739 published in 2020 online, since ISO 22739 contains only three clauses and ISO allows the public to preview the first three clauses of ISO standards without purchasing a licence.)

ISO/TC 307 is currently working with ISO/TC 46/SC 11 Archives/records management to develop a new technical report, Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology in relation to authoritative records, records systems, and records management.  The authoritativeness of records in records systems generally flows from the roles and intentions of specifically identified records managers, although it has been observed that records in distributed ledger systems can often be relied upon even in cases in which the actors are unidentified or even anonymous.  How is this possible?  Under what circumstances can DLT be used as part of a records system, and what do archival science and records management practice tell us about the opportunities and limits of DLT systems?  The first in-person meeting of experts was convened in Vancouver, Canada in January 2020, and the project has had 62 regular virtual meetings over the past two years.  Soon, and perhaps before the end of the autumn, the project shall advance to the committee stage, where a broader set of experts will have a chance to help the group answer some tough questions about records management and DLT.

In the last few years, Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has developed a set of standardized RDF ontologies and XML schemas for the codification of intellectual property (IP) rights information related to music and media. The emerging ISO/IEC 21000-23 Smart Contracts for Media standard specifies the means (e.g., application programming interfaces) for converting these RDF ontologies and XML schemas to smart contracts that can be executed on existing distributed ledge technologies (DLT) environments.

This important standard will greatly assist the music and media industry and its stakeholders in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLT environments. In this way, it will increase trust among the stakeholders for sharing high-value data (e.g., music rights) in the ecosystem.

•     White paper (incl. webinar slides): https://tinyurl.com/2ne769wn

Join the continuation of this exciting work towards a full fledged decentralized media rights ecosystem, based on DLT agnostic ISO/IEC 21000-23 Smart Contracts for Media at: https://tinyurl.com/2bbukxfs  

During the past 6 months there have been developments in selected ongoing projects in ISO/TC 307 - ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 JWG4:

ISO/PRF TR 23249 Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies – Overview of existing DLT systems for identity management – Stage 50.20 Proof sent to Secretariat or FDIS ballot initiated: 2 months

ISO/DTR 23644 Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies - Overview of trust anchors for DLT-based identity management (TADIM) – Stage 30.60 Close of voting/comment period

ISO/AWI 7603 Decentralized Identity standard for the identification of subjects and objects. Scope: A standard for the design and use of decentralized and self-sovereign identification of subjects (legal entities and natural persons) and objects, assets within the design of Blockchain and DLT Systems, in conjunction with Verifiable Credentials (VCs). The standard will refer to available identification standards from ISO as well as other standardization bodies, such as W3C, GLEIF, IETF, ITU, IEEE, etc. and non-standardization global consortiums, such as DIF, TOIP, and the Kantara Initiative. Purpose is to support developers to deliver cost and time efficient development of high quality Blockchain and DLT systems for managing identity across a defined architectural stack. To create awareness of available standards of subjects (legal entities and natural persons) and objects and to give an overview of existing identifier standards. - Stage 20.00 New project registered in TC/SC work programme.

ISO/PWI 12833 Re-identification and privacy vulnerabilities and mitigation methods in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies – Stage 00.00 Proposal for new project received

MPEG Smart Contracts for Media
Webinar | Wed, March 30, 2022 | 2:00PM – 3:00PM BST
Registration and further info at: https://lnkd.in/diRBqrvY

On blockchain agnostic smart contracts for fair, timely and transparent payment of royalties to artists and rightsholders. At the 137th MPEG meeting, MPEG Systems promoted ISO/IEC 21000-23 to its final stage of development. This important standard will greatly assist the music and media industry stakeholders in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLTs. In this way, it also increases stakeholders trust for sharing high-value data (e.g., music rights) in the ecosystem. Join the webinar to find out on standards' role in the future of music and media industry.

The ITU has largely contributed to the field of Distributed Ledger Technology and Blockchain, ranging financial inclusion to data management. Several working groups have already provided prominent contributions to DLT standards. Some examples are SG2: Operational aspects, SG17: Security, and SG13: Networks and cloud, which have established focus groups on FG-DPM, FG-AI4EE, or FG-DLT.

The kind of outputs provided by ITU to the DLT include, but are not limited to:

• Management models, functionalities and interfaces for DLT
• Applicability of DLT in addressing international accounting, policy, regulatory and economic issues in the telecommunications/ICT domain
• Environmentally efficient solutions for DLT implementation and developing Recommendations on the sustainable use of DLTs
• Identification of standardisation gaps on the environmental performance of DLT and how to address their environmental efficiency
• DLT signalling and protocol architectures, data models and testing requirements
• Frameworks and functional requirements of DLT use cases in future networks, cloud computing and trusted network infrastructures
• Guidelines on security aspects of DLTs and specification of security requirements for various DLT use cases

For more information, refer to the ITU study groups working programmes.

ISO/IEC 21000-23 Smart Contracts for Media standard provides the means (e.g., application programming interfaces) for converting MPEG-21 XML and RDF media contracts (ISO/IEC 21000-19 Media Value Chain Ontology, ISO/IEC 21000-19/AMD1 Audio Value Chain Ontology, ISO/IEC 21000-20 (2nd Ed) Contract Expression Language and ISO/IEC 21000-21 (2nd Ed) Media Contract Ontology) to smart contracts that can be executed on existing DLT environments.

This important standard will greatly assist the media industry in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLTs. Such a process in turn will increase trust among the industry stakeholders for sharing data (e.g., music catalogues and associated IP rights metadata) in the ecosystem. Another important feature of this standard is that it offers the possibility to bind the clauses of a smart contract with those of a narrative contract. In this way, each party signing an MPEG derived smart contact will know exactly what the clauses stored in the smart contract express.

The latter standard has reached Draft International Standard (DIS) level at the 136th MPEG meeting, 11-15 Oct. 2021. Thus, the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG03 MPEG Systems subgroup on ‘Smart Contracts for Media’ invites all interested experts to contribute and consider joining its mailing list at https://lists.aau.at/mailman/listinfo/smart-contracts. We would welcome your input on these activities and other matters of mutual interest.

References

1. Panos Kudumakis, et. al., 'The Challenge: From MPEG Intellectual Property Rights Ontologies to Smart Contracts and Blockchains', IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, pp. 89-95, Vol. 37, Issue 2, Mar. 2020. http://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2019.2955207
2. ISO/IEC DIS 21000-23 Information technology - Multimedia framework (MPEG-21) - Part 23: Smart Contracts for Media, Oct. 2021. https://www.iso.org/standard/82527.html