Metadata In Digital Asset Management

Metadata is used to help humans find specific items related to an asset and is usually expressed as a set of keywords.  Metadata basically describes other data. It provides information about an asset’s content. 

Prior to metadata standards, every image management system had its own proprietary methods for storing image information, which meant that the information was not available outside of the software — if you sent a photo to someone else, the descriptive information did not travel with it. Metadata allows this information to be transported with the file, in a way that can be understood by other software, hardware, and end users. It can even be transferred between file formats.

Metadata can be stored either internally, in the same file as the data called embedded metadata, or externally, in a separate file.

For example, an image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, when the image was created, and other data. This would be Internal Metadata.

A text document's metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document would be External Metadata.

The Mediabox Digital Asset Management application (Mediabox-DAM) stores the external metadata in Attribute fields that are logically organized and used for quick search results.

Written by Dave.