The first metadata-exclusive event, held last June during the CEPIC Congress in Florence, established the need for a global industry-wide gathering dedicated to this subject. The chairman of the CEPIC technical committee, Staffan Teste, said that it is becoming more difficult to prove image ownership in court. Metadata, which provides a way of embedding a unique identifier into an image, is "something that people in the business have been longing for many years," he added.

During the last year, the IPTC put out updated core metadata standards and a new set of extended standards. These will be publicly presented for the first time during the Malta conference. In addition, the Stock Artists Alliance will discuss the use of metadata by major distributors and an SAA project to encourage metadata use by photographers.

Discussion topics scheduled for the conference include keywording, user-interface support for metadata input and unifying identification of images globally. CEPIC president Alan Smith points out that "metadata is critical... but how can we apply it to avoid ambiguity and misunderstandings among our customers?"

Conference attendees will include image creators, photo editors, metadata gurus, equipment manufacturers and other key industry players. Hosted by CEPIC, the metadata event is organized by the International Press Telecommunications Council, a U.K.-based consortium that develops and maintains technical standards used by news organizations worldwide, and IFRA, a worldwide research organization of the news-publishing industry.