Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Very interesting webinar recording by Demian Hess: Managing Digital Rights Metadata with Semantic Technologies. (You need to supply your e-mail address to view the recording, and playback requires Windows Media Player, but it’s worth it if you’re into Digital Asset Management and rights metadata.) Demian explains how complex licenses are, and how people try to…

As a Semantic Web / Linked Data newbie, I’m struggling with finding the right URIs for properties and values. Say I have a screenshot as an PNG image file. If I were to describe it in the Atom feed format, I’d make an “entry” for it, write the file size into the “link/@length” attribute, the…

All the content-based software I know (WCMS, DAM and editorial systems) is built the same way: It stashes its data (content, metadata, workflow definitions, permissions) in a private, jealously guarded database. Which is great for control, consistency, performance, simpler development. But when you’re running multiple systems – each of which is an isolated data silo…

Deborah Fanslow – Who Needs a DAM Librarian? Part II: Information Professionals: A Field Guide: “Information professional specimens often manifest the following dispositions: perpetual curiosity, creativity, technical fluency, a compulsive need to create order out of chaos, and an intense passion for connecting people with information. […] Originating around the turn of the 19th century…

In software, the thing I’m most excited about at the moment is schema flexibility. (I first saw that term in a tweet by Emily Ann Kolvitz.) I think we’re losing a lot of valuable metadata, and business value, because the software we keep our structured data in makes it so hard to change the data…

Laurence Hart – Chaos Reigns at Content Management Vendors: “Cloud had been dismissed before, as clients hadn’t been asking for the cloud. Customers hadn’t asked because they determined that the legacy vendors were the wrong people to ask. […] It wasn’t until last year that they started to realize that a SaaS service was what…

1988: As a teen, I wanted to learn to code but couldn’t afford to buy Turbo Pascal for my Atari ST. Most programming languages (interpreters / compilers) were distributed commercially. There was no Web to download from, someone had to ship floppy disks. 1994: As a student, I loved to have Pascal (commercial but cheap)…

Our DC-X DAM software is one of those DAM systems that (while offering general-purpose DAM functionality) focus on the news/publishing industry. For our newspaper- or magazine-publishing customers, publication metadata is among the most important: Name of the publication, publication date, page number, section name etc. (see DC-X publication data, based on the PRISM standard). This…

A big question at the recent IPTC Machine Readable Rights Workshop was how to get people to adopt a standard for rights metadata. A “business case” would certainly help: There will often be no budget if machine readable rights don’t save money (or even earn it). Below is a short list of possible business cases.…