I will be at the Henry Stewart DAM show in New York speaking on Friday May 21 about Media Centric Navigational Experiences. I often talk about a Media Centric approach to asset management as opposed to a Systems Centric approach when describing what strongly attached metadata can enable.
The concept is pretty simple but also quite powerful – by adding metadata to the asset, one is able to navigate related information from the asset. Strongly attached metadata allows me to begin my information discovery from the asset itself because it has carried it’s context with it.
How many times have you found a photo or presentation and then wanted to find the email thread that discussed the content of the asset? Or just simply wanted to know, where did this asset come from? And can I use it?
Well, a metadata savvy email client, or web client would be able to capture some of that context by inserting a related link, relevent URLs, even people or topics into the metadata of the asset you downloaded. It would enable that asset to be contextually linked to where it came from, allowing you to more easily navigate from the asset to the context.
That is one simple example, but imagine establishing a core schema of critical business properties that can be embedded into all your media. As the media flowed through your systems, it would populate the schema with values and links to authoritative information source within your company. Ultimately allowing the end user to quickly jump from the asset to those sources. The media user would immediately understand who has been associated with the asset, what projects it has been involved with, how much it has or will cost, what the current status is.
You may ask, isn’t that what an asset management system does? Well, yes but… The difference is one of putting all your informational eggs in one DAM basket versus an organic web of information that can be strongly attached to your asset. A DAM is still required for caching and indexing information but the media is really at the center of capturing and linking to related information.
A Media Centric approach compliments other search and discovery processes to make it ultimately easier for the end user to navigate to the desired information from the context that they started from.
From Gunar 