{"id":1837,"date":"2016-08-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-14T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwneu.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2016\/08\/15\/1597-2\/"},"modified":"2016-08-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-14T22:00:00","slug":"1597-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2016\/08\/15\/1597-2\/","title":{"rendered":"David Diamond: Metadata for Content Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

I enjoyed reading David Diamond\u2019s new book Metadata for Content Management<\/a><\/strong>. He\u2019s covering everything a DAM system or CMS customer needs to know about metadata fields, contents and policy and how they affect search, workflows and interoperability. The book is written for practical use, in plain and fun language and with excellent examples for every single point he makes. (Disclosure: I\u2019m listed on the \u201cThanks\u201d page of the book so I\u2019m slightly biased.) Check out the table of contents,<\/a> an excerpt<\/a> and Ralph Windsor\u2019s review<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Good metadata schema design rarely gets the attention it deserves in DAM projects. I\u2019d ask our project managers to send a copy of David\u2019s book to each new DAM system customer so they can prepare better for the requirements workshops we\u2019re doing\u2026 if only Adaptive Metadata<\/strong> (as implemented<\/a> by David\u2019s employer, Picturepark) weren\u2019t so prominently featured in the book. That\u2019s not to criticize the book \u2013 Adaptive Metadata is a great concept, and it makes sense to use it throughout the book since it helps keep the examples clear and simple. Our DAM product has somewhat similar functionality (form fields can dynamically be shown or hidden based on arbitrary metadata), but it\u2019s lacking a few features and a good UI. So I guess our customers would, after studying the book, expect our product to do things it cannot yet do. (Which is fine with me \u2013 to quote my last blog post<\/a>, I \u201clove the product we want to build, not the one we already have\u201d \u2013 but a problem for our project manager who needs to get things done with what\u2019s available right now.)<\/p>\n

My only criticism of Adaptive Metadata is that in some cases, it might lead you to assigning metadata directly to an asset when it should really be on a separate object<\/strong>. David\u2019s examples include modeling workflow metadata as (adaptive) asset metadata. This can be problematic in systems where multiple workflows might be going on at the same time. Example: When two publications are using the same image, one might already have it approved by the editor but to the Photoshop guy is still working on it, while at the same time, the other publication\u2019s editor isn\u2019t yet through with it but their image editing is done already. The best way to model this is to have separate \u201cworkflow records\u201d (each with their own set of metadata), not metadata fields directly on the asset. (Though it\u2019ll be hard to have separate objects work as nicely in the UI, so you\u2019ll be better off using Adaptive Metadata if you don\u2019t need concurrent workflows.)<\/p>\n

Which leads me to my (short but) favorite section in David\u2019s book: \u201cEverything becomes a Linked Object\u201d<\/strong>. It\u2019s about how metadata attributes, like colors or countries, are actually objects with attributes of their own, and \u201ceverything is linked to everything else\u201d. I\u2019ve been writing about this in It\u2019s content, not just DAM metadata<\/a> and DAM and the Semantic Web<\/a>, and I love Topic Maps<\/a> because they\u2019re the perfect data model for it. To quote from the book: \u201cMost content systems still don\u2019t offer functionality that supports this concept of universal linking. Expect that to change.\u201d That\u2019s one of the things I\u2019m really looking forward to\u2026<\/p>\n

Thanks for a great read, David!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I enjoyed reading David Diamond\u2019s new book Metadata for Content Management. He\u2019s covering everything a DAM system or CMS customer needs to know about metadata fields, contents and policy and how they affect search, workflows and interoperability. The book is written for practical use, in plain and fun language and with excellent examples for every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weblog"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}