Digital Asset Management and the Semantic Web

Mike Linksvayer, September 19th, 2007 Creative Commons weblog

One way to think of Digital Asset Management is as “enterprise software” for media shops. Another is as the functional opposite of DRM — DAM helps organizations deal with and make use of huge volumes of media, including of course tracking licensing, while DRM attempts to “deal” with users who might want to use individual pieces of media.

It isn’t just media shops and large organizations that have large libraries of media to track and be able to use optimally in various productions. So I’ve been predicting for awhile that DAM-like features will rapidly filter down into “consumer” creator software. One vector for this is growing support for XMP, which allows for embedding arbitrary metadata in media files (Adobe originated XMP, which is based on RDF, the core Semantic Web metadata technology).

Microsoft has apparently gone the next several steps by basing Microsoft Media Manager on RDF and OWL. Via David Seth, who pulls these two quotes from the Media Manager site:

“This RDF model allows companies to add nuance and intelligence to media management beyond what is possible with traditional metadata.”
“… Most importantly, the IMM RDF model overcomes traditional barriers to metadata sharing between external systems.”

That’s great. Now it should be really easy to build support for CC licensing into the Media Manager, if it isn’t there already. 🙂

Three recent and related pieces on the CC blog, if you read between the lines: Introducing Desktop Licensing, Your copyright metadata on a GRDDL, and File Info panel for Adobe applications.