Segavaid

Segavaid is a standardized system for identifying discrete segments within audio and video content. It provides unique, location-insensitive identifiers for specific portions of media to support precise citation, retrieval, and rights management across libraries, archives, media platforms, and scholarly publications. By separating the concept of a segment from a physical file location, segavaid enables stable references even as storage locations and formats change.

An identifier typically encodes several elements: a prefix or scheme name, the media type (for example video or podcast), a segment selector (often expressed as timestamps or frame ranges), start and end boundaries, and an integrity component such as a content hash. The exact encoding is defined by the segavaid specification, and implementations commonly expose the identifier as a URI or URL that can be dereferenced over the web to obtain metadata about the segment.

Origins and governance of segavaid trace to efforts within digital preservation and media archiving to support precise clip-level referencing and rights tracking. The specification is published as an open standard, with a maintenance process and a public registry that records segment definitions, metadata schemas, and version history. Resolving a segavaid typically returns a descriptor document containing the segment’s boundaries, duration, associated metadata (title, creator, rights, provenance), and links to the full media resource or to related segments.

Applications include scholarly citation of media excerpts, granular rights management, transcript and caption alignment, and cross-archive linking. Segavaid is designed to interoperate with existing metadata standards and can be mapped to DOIs, UUIDs, or other persistent identifiers. It also supports integration with Linked Data practices and annotation ecosystems, such as IIIF, to enhance discoverability and reuse.