Digital Asset Management Foundation - Coffee Meet-Up - Notes and Audio

In my last blog post I mentioned I was taking part in an informal 'meet-up' to discuss Digital Asset Management (DAM). I made some rough notes during the call, which I hope will serve to give a flavour of the discussions:

Topics:

• The need to broaden the understanding of DAM.
• The need to share experiences and challenges in DAM.
• The need to connect with clients, understand needs and deliver targeted solutions.
• Creating metadata and vocabularies to support assets: images and video.
• Applying metadata to image and video assets - manual, automatic and semi-automatic solutions.
• DAM solutions: 'software as a service' versus 'enterprise solutions'.
• Creating Vision Statements for DAM.
• The phases of DAM.
  
• DAM return on investment: key task analysis, baselining and measuring outcomes.
• Controlled vocabularies for DAM - license to kick start development, then develop and customise.
• Using consultancy to support DAM creation and utilisation.
• Working with legacy data in DAM systems.
• Harvesting metadata from creators and suppliers.
• Adding value through manual tagging of assets.
• Tagging assets using: external sources - off-shore or local, or in-house resources.
• Video processing: soundtrack indexing, scene and key recognition.
  

For those who want to listen to the conversation you're free to do so by visiting the following URL:

DAM Foundation - Audio Track of Coffee Meetup 27 Nov 2009

The audio is a little broken up at the start, but stick with it, it gets better. Also, time delays between the US and UK means it sounds as if the speakers are talking over each other.

Speakers were:

• Nigel Cliffe, Managing Director at Cliffe Associates Ltd
• Ian Davis, Taxonomy Delivery Manager, Outside Americas, Dow Jones Client Solutions
• Henrik de Gyor, Digital Asset Manager at K12 Inc

I hope you all enjoy the conversation, we hope to arrange more in a few weeks.

Ian

Image Findability: Improving through Tags

Take a look at my recent article on Image Findability on FUMSI - bit.ly/LQ3UP

My article outlines the options open to tag images for a business need - selling, sharing, reducing duplication of effort etc. It assumes an image focused audit or assessment has already understood the creation and use of image content and the need is to choose from a set of options in order to create a tagging plan, with a set of rules, guidelines and success metrics.

Report from the ISKO Content Architecture Conference - 22-23 June, London, UK

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at the fascinating ISKO Content Architecture Conference.

On Monday I gave a presentation on, "Still Digital Images - the hardest things to classify and find."

My presentation looked at the image market and the ways in which images can be annotated - or is that processed, classified, categorized, tagged, keyworded… We need a controlled vocabulary to controlled the vocabulary of controlled vocabulary!

I then went on to raise some of the challenges of image organization and retrieval - picking out the need to consider different image domains and user groups, and considering how to provide users with access to basic attributes, depicted content and abstract concepts linked to images.

There were some amazingly interesting presentations over the two days of this event.

Highlights for me included a great keynote from David Crystal looking at the evolution of the linguistic approach to content analysis. Madi Solomon highlighted the challenges faced by Disney and Pearson in the management of content using metadata. Charles Inskip opened my mind to music categorization and sale, and the many similarities with image retrieval and organization. Also, intriguing was the work showcased by the BBC's Tom Scott, who spoke about 'Building Coherence at bbc.co.uk'

As always at these events, interesting posters and presentations abounded, and this blog can only give a flavour of them.

If you want to know more, the organizers have made abstracts available online, and in some cases full papers. They also plan to make the slides of individual presentations available along with recorded audio. I'm told the full set of resources will be on the conference website in the next few weeks.

Next week I'm at a Digital Asset Management (DAM) conference in London talking about "Tagging Images for Findability: making your DAM system work for you." More about that next week.

Ian

This post first appeared in the Synaptica Central Blog