Keeping track of digital assets

As the supervisor of the video repository at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, she's one of the people responsible for cataloging all the video that's shot during a 10-day shuttle mission--as much as 200 hours of digital information.

When NASA wants to access specific parts of the footage, Stewart's department has to find them, which means the video must be carefully digitized and consistently cataloged. Using Convera's RetrievalWare software to store and catalog the content, Stewart's group lists the "who, what, when, and where" of what's going on, creating a file of metadata (data about the data, essentially) so the video can be easily retrieved.

"We need very exact searches," says Stewart. "When NASA's partners call, they need everything we have, and we can't afford to miss anything."

Though NASA is working with the richest media around, it's facing the same challenge as most corporations: how to catalog, organize, search, and retrieve digital information. As the Web becomes a channel for the distribution of information, all this digital information has become an asset--something companies can license, resell, or simply rely upon as a competitive advantage.

Raiders of the lost data

The software that handles this data, known as digital asset management (DAM) software, is the sibling of document management, content management, and search engines, but it has its own challenges. A corporation's data, taken in its entirety, resembles the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark--text, audio, video, and graphics in all shapes and sizes. The data could be structured database input, unstructured PowerPoint presentations, even computer code.

"There are a bunch of technologies vying for a piece of DAM," says IDC analyst Josh Duhl, who cites a dozen companies that have strategies relating to DAM or enterprise content management (ECM). These include: Canto on the desktop; IBM, Computer Associates, and Oracle on the high end; and Interwoven, Verity, and Vignette, which target the specific content management and retrieval tasks within the enterprise. "Some people talk about accessing information from ERP and CRM systems, but we're a long way from an integrated global ECM system," says Duhl.

Because many industries use rich media but aren't managing it effectively, companies other than traditional media outlets--such as retail organizations with advertising issues and government agencies with paper-retrieval issues--are considering DAM. Because digital asset management is so closely related to other information management technologies, a number of vendors have already solved the issues of cataloging, architecture, and integration with systems that may meet your needs as well, whether they're as simple as digitizing paper or as out-of-this-world as NASA's video cataloging.

One of the most ticklish facets of DAM is its organization--setting up a consistent, understandable catalog so that search mechanisms retrieve the appropriate information accurately.

"Cataloging is a critical issue, but it's been a critical issue for librarians for 100 years," says Charly Bauer, assistant director of library systems for OhioLink. The state-funded library organization, which serves both private and public higher education facilities in the state, uses Documentum's Bulldog software to manage its digital assets.

Other entities besides libraries are now encountering the idea of enforced consistency. "You need a system that will let you build in consistent vocabulary and syntax," Bauer says, adding that OhioLink uses authority files (the final, authoritative word on a particular subject) based on the subject headings derived by the Library of Congress.

On the flip side, it's also crucial to have an easy interface for users who are doing search-and-retrieval, says Dr. Ganapathy Krishnan, chief technology officer for MusicNet, a digital distribution platform for streaming and downloading music, which uses Verity's K2 Enterprise software as part of its DAM strategy. "The problem is that you can get too much information," he says. "You need a combination of search and navigation so that [users] can quickly hone [in on] what they want."

Krishnan insists that you have to take the hardware architecture into account as well as the cataloging structure. "The rule of thumb is that search results have to come back in a matter of seconds," he says. "In order to deliver a good consumer experience, put your search capabilities on a separate server. That way, if your search volume goes up, you can scale that server without scaling your entire database." It's a way to keep costs down, too, he says, because a search license is generally cheaper than a database license.

Comedy Central has taken the concept of offloading its information one step further.

"We wanted to avoid a multimillion dollar investment in infrastructure, software, and training," says CTO Alex Spinelli. "We're still a tape company. I wanted to avoid converting the entire company to a digital company all at once."

As a result, Spinelli says, "We looked at DAM as a metadata challenge." The company pushes the content that represents the asset--promotional clips and other content from the television network--out to AT&T and Akamai, its content distribution providers. "I don't want to store it or stream it," says Spinelli. "I want it close to the user, because our content distribution providers have economies of scale in both bandwidth and fault tolerance."

Comedy Central uses Interwoven's TeamSite software simply to describe its digital assets, and ATG's Dynamo application server to create business rules, along with the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). "We use metadata to create a SMIL file that describes everything, including how to present it, how long it runs, and these rules are integrated into it," Spinelli says. "Now we have a very discrete unit that can be published or syndicated to any Web service."

The future gets stickier

Most DAM vendors got their start elsewhere: Verity in search and retrieval, Documentum in file management, and Interwoven in content management, just to name three. All these capabilities are integral to DAM, but the challenges of deploying DAM aren't going to get any easier. As DAM becomes more important, and information is stored in different kinds of digital formats, it's going to touch more of what a company stores. Eventually, it's going to have to integrate with workflow and knowledge management software as well.

In the meantime, you can use the confusion in the DAM market to your advantage: Do some comparison shopping, looking at your needs and budgets from the perspective of what's most important to you--document management, content management, or search and retrieval.

"It's not a one-size-fits-all market," insists IDC's Duhl, "but there are probably three vendors that are going to fit everything you need to do."

Adds Comedy Central's Spinelli: "The top vendor will have the best product but it may also be the most expensive. The second vendor in line may solve your problems just as well for less money."

How is your organization managing its digital assets? How do you think DAM technology will evolve? TalkBack below.

Howard Baldwin most recently wrote about mobile CRM applications for ZDNet Tech Update.