RDF and schema.org for DAM interoperability
There’s no widely-accepted standard for DAM data yet
Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are the hubs for organizations’ creative content. DAMs need to exchange data with other systems all the time: import creative works and metadata from external content providers, export digital assets and metadata to Web Content Mananagement systems and so on. Sadly, none of the various DAM related standards (like the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set Lisa Grimm writes about, or IPTC NewsML G2) have been broadly adopted by DAM vendors. At least not broadly enough that you can expect to exchange data between DAM systems without programming effort. Update: OASIS CMIS4DAM is “in development” for quite a while now, but I’m not too excited about it as participation costs money and I don’t find CMIS particularly easy to implement.
Do we need a new standard?
Inventing a new standard is rarely a good idea. (You’ve probably seen the XKCD comic on standards.) If there is an existing open standard that more or less matches our use case, we better use that one to benefit from the existing documentation, tools, and adoption.
I suggest that we encourage the DAM community to move towards the schema.org vocabulary in an RDF syntax. This is the stuff that already powers large parts of the emerging Semantic Web. It introduces the DAM to the world of Linked Data.
