Meeting Recorder Naming Conventions

The goal of the naming conventions is to have consistent, short, easy to use names for people, microphones, channels, etc. We also wanted each field to be fixed length, so sorting and listing is easier.

• Meeting IDs
• Speaker IDs
• Microphone IDs
• Transmission IDs


• Digit Audio Filenames

Meeting IDs

An individual meeting (also called a session) is labeled with an alphanumeric tag. For example, "Bmr002". The tag consists of three fields. The first field must be alphabetic and all uppercase, and should be one letter. It represents the location of the recording. The locations assigned so far are:

The second field must be alphabetic and all lowercase, and should have two letters. It represents the meeting type. The following tags are currently assigned:

Note that each site may assign their own IDs for meeting types.

The final field must be numeric, consisting of three digits (e.g. "004").

Issues

A problem with this convention is the limited number of locations (26), meeting types (676), and meeting instances (1000). If we do end up with too many, we can either break the fixed field criterion, or relabel with more characters. Breaking the fixed field criterion perhaps isn't too bad, since the mixed-case and alphanumeric distinction still allows easy disambiguation.

Adding more characters counters our desire for short tags. We could also create a subdirectories for each location, but then you need two bits of information to label a meeting - the location and a tag, rather than just one short tag.

Opinions, anyone?

Speaker IDs

Speaker tags consist of "m", "f", or "u" for male, female, and unknown respectively, followed by "e" for native English speaker or "n" for non-native English speaker, followed by three numbers. The numbers should be unique across all speakers (e.g. there is only one person with a speaker ID ending in 003). For example, "fn002" and "me005" are both legal speaker IDs.

We have developed an XML database containing speaker information, including contact information, education level, language, age, etc. Take a look at the online speaker form to see the sort of information we collect.

For more information about the format of the speaker database, please contact janin@icsi.berkeley.edu.

Mic IDs

A microphone ID represents the type of microphone. It is separate from the transmission ID, which represents the method by which the signal gets to the recording equipment. A microphone ID consists of a letter and a number. The microphone IDs used at ICSI are:

Transmission IDs

The transmission ID represents the method by which the microphone is connected to the recording equipment. It is a letter followed by a number. The channel IDs used at ICSI are:

Digit Audio Filenames

As an example of the use of the conventions, we present here the naming convention of the digit audio files. These files contain the audio of a person reading a digit string. The files are named as follows:

mid-userid-micid-transid-channel-transnum-trans.wav

where:

• mid is the meeting id
• userid is the user id
• micid is the microphone id
• transid is the transmission id
• channel is the channel (which should be a single character, 0-9a-f)
• transnum is the transcript number (a unique number representing which digit string was read)
• trans is the transcript of what was read, with "0" for "zero" and "o" for "oh"

For example, Bmr005-me001-l1-w1-b-1207-o5101.wav is from a Meeting Recorder meeting recorded at ICSI, a male English speaker, using the Sony lapel mic with the Sony transmitter/receiver, on channel "b", and the digits read were "oh five one zero one".

Questions or comments to: janin@icsi.berkeley.edu