Using XMP in your DAM
juni 22nd, 2009 | 
Auteur: One of our large DAM customers called me last week about how to manage the rights on photographs. The problem at hand : images of applications are used for commercial purposes by their subsidiaries worldwide. Sometimes the “owners” of the application have given limited rights to use this imagery. Before XMP, an open standard sponsored by Adobe, this would have implied maintaining and synchronizing this information in multiple locations and databases. This exercise in digital rights management can be simplified by adhering to the XMP standard.
To implement XMP to the present DAM system, which is basically an entry-level application of our Marcom Factory SaaS suite, we do two things :
- append XMP metadata to the present collection of images. This is achieved by importing a simple text or comma-separated file containing that information and linking it to the assets. From then onwards, every file ordered in the DAM will be downloaded with its metadata envelope.
- write a small how-to guide so the creators, managers and approvers of new images can enter the metadata in their CMS system.
What remains to be done is educating your users on rights-managed images and how to use them within the agreed limitations in time and territory. Which is something you would have to do anyway.
Geplaatst in 
Tags:
Glad to see you are leveraging the power of XMP to carry critical information directly within the asset. Check out PLUS which is a rights language that is based on XMP:
http://www.useplus.org/
Gunnar,
Thanks for your reaction.
I heard about PLUS when attending the XMP meeting at HS DAM in LA last november. Do you know if it’s being adopted outside the US as well?
The simplicity that is XMP - Ah yes, your files become something that can last forever - no matter the platform!
Comments from Linkedin group on Digital Asset Management :
very useful post, and clear enough for someone with no technical background as me.
Can XMP applied recursively? My company has published online about 50,000 clips complete with metatags. Would it be possible to attach the XMP envelope to the various encodes now, or we would need to start the process again from scratch?
Modern DAM apps that allow you to edit and append XMP data will almost always have an option to do it recursively. Some will hold the data in it’s own
database and ‘attach’ a side car (the data) to the file when it’s downloaded, while other’s will actually write the data into the XMP space of the individual assets themselves. Depending on the DAM program, you should also have the ability to select if you’d like to ‘append’ existing data, or overwrite it all. Hope that helps.
The solution outlined above is indeed what we will do for this particular application :
In a first step, the data will be stored in extra fields that will later be written into the XMP space of the individual assets. This has to do with upgrading a component of our DAM solution to full XMP-compliance.
Comments from the Masters of Digital Assets group on Linkedin
FR : Thanks for this pointer. I’m always happy to see adoption of XMP. I also want to say that XMP’s xml format makes it a natural for search and analytic services provided by xml content servers. No shredding xmp elements into relational database tables. This suggests an architecture where the xml content server becomes an integral part of the DAM.
WS : I have been involved in many enterprise DAM implementation projects that utilize XMP in order to track assets and asset re-use. TeleScope Enterprise from Northplains Systems can read and write XMP data to and from XMP compliant files if the XMP plug-in is installed. This makes it very simple and convenient to use XMP with the DAM.
Hello,
We have built a solution to address the metadata management problem using Adobe XMP. Please see
http://www.itcinfotech.com/media-entertainment/Metadata-Management.aspx
for more details.
Thanks & Regards,
Karunakar Gowni
Assetlink (www.assetlink.com), which offers an Enterprise MRM solution has incorporated XMP in the Digital Asset Management solution. Users can now create “smart assets” that carrying information such as copyright information. Assets can be easily searched and retrieved using the XMP information.
The ability to apply XMP recursively as well the ability to pull stored data into XMP provides great benefits to the DAM user.