Just a quick thought:

I’m convinced that each company needs its own, internal version of Google’s Knowledge Graph – all the information that’s vital to the business, in “complex models with many connected entities” (Axel Morgner), to help improve search, bridge data silos, and make metadata entry much easier.

Listen to Dr. Andreas Weber make his case: Semantic PDM: Using a Graph Data Model at Schleich. (I heard him talk about it at the Neo4j Graph Talks in Hamburg, see the German slides on Semantic Data Management).

More on this (Semantic relationships, deep content, Topic Maps, Storylines) in my post: It’s content, not just DAM metadata

Update (2017-08-21): See Andreas Blumauer – A Standard to build Knowledge Graphs: 12 Facts about SKOS and Kendall Clark – What is a Knowledge Graph?

Update (2019-10-12): Kurt Cagle – Why Knowledge Bases Are the Next Big Thing

A bit later than usual, here’s the Digital Asset Management articles from February which had a lasting impression on me – picked from the constant stream of blog posts you can see float by on Planet DAM. For more curated DAM links, see the weekly Digital Asset Management.com Links.

DAM News runs a batch of interesting articles in its “Improving DAM in 2017” series that offers perspectives beyond the usual DAM vendor content marketing material. Most articles are written by guest authors, with an introduction by DAM News host Ralph Windsor which is always worth a read, too:

• Better Ways To Engage With Your Vendor by Ricky Patten / Engaging With Vendors by Ralph Windsor
• Creating The Right Conditions For Innovation by Martin Wilson / Creating The Conditions For DAM Innovation by Ralph Windsor
• Should DAM Be More Like Facebook? by Denzil Ford / Should Social Media In DAM Be More Like Facebook? by Ralph Windsor
• Digital Assets From IoT To Blockchain by Medhat Mahmoud / The Expanding Universe Of Digital Assets by Ralph Windsor

If you’re interested in DAM innovation, make sure to read David Diamond’s excellent interviews with Picturepark employees Olivia Schütt, Rethinking Digital Asset Management, and Stefan Seidl: An API-first Approach to Content Creation, Management and Routing.

In response to Ralph Windsor’s call for contributions, and with the help of ImageSnippet’s Margaret Warren, I have written an article for DAM News:

Improving DAM Interoperability In 2017

Make sure to also read Ralph Windsor’s accompanying piece DAM Interoperability In 2017 – Where Do We Go From Here?.

I’m looking forward to your feedback and opinions – let’s discuss the article in the comments section, on LinkedIn, via Twitter or e-mail.

Field values – inside an SQL database column, an XML tag, or an image’s embedded metadata – are the “atoms” of a data model: the smallest unit. For example, in this record:

<country>
  <name>Germany</name>
  <population>82175700</population>
</country>

… the number “82,175,700” is the field value in the “Germany” country record’s “population” field.

Just as with atoms, there’s a bit more to them once you dig a little deeper. Imagine your boss complaining “this number is wrong – how did it end up in our database?” You might explain to him that you entered this number into the database because the Wikipedia page you visited last week said this was the approximate population of Germany, according to a 2015 estimate.

This week, during the Digital Collections Customer Days (for the DACH region, i.e. German-speaking) in Hamburg, I did a talk on “DAM Trends 2017”.

Here’s the slides (or download a PDF of the presentation):