BBC Research and Development has introduced the Time-Addressable Data Store, or TADS, an open API specification for reading, writing and editing data that belongs on a media timeline. The work follows the Time-Addressable Media Store but deliberately focuses on metadata rather than audio and video essence.
A TADS implementation creates Tracks and stores Events on them. Each track can share a timeline with media in TAMS or another archive or media-asset-management system. Event payloads use JSON, while a managed JSON Schema validates incoming data so applications can agree on structure without sharing one database design.
The specification supports events that overlap, such as simultaneous actor visibility, and events that change over time, such as transcripts improved after an initial automated pass. That makes the model relevant to captions, compliance, sports data, object tracking and editorial annotations as well as machine-learning results.
TADS is still alpha software and BBC R&D currently retains control of the specification. Governance, production-scale performance, security, versioning and interoperability results have not been published. Facilities should therefore treat it as an architectural building block for experiments, not a finished replacement for an operational metadata platform.
