Very interesting webinar recording by Demian Hess: Managing Digital Rights Metadata with Semantic Technologies. (You need to supply your e-mail address to view the recording, and playback requires Windows Media Player, but it’s worth it if you’re into Digital Asset Management and rights metadata.)

Demian explains how complex licenses are, and how people try to simplify them because the complexity / variability doesn’t fit into their DAM systems. And why dumbing down doesn’t work too well in the long term.

His approach is to losslessly store all the licensing terms in a separate RDF database, which is integrated with the DAM system so that terms can be displayed along with the DAM asset information in the user interface. Special licensing reports (using SPARQL in the backend) can list all the different terms for a set of assets.

I only wonder why there’s no mention of RightsML? RightsML, hopefully, is going to become the standard for rights metadata, and it’s built on semantic technology. See my blog post Rights Management in the DC-X DAM – and RightsML.

Demian also wrote an article on Digital Rights and the Cost of "Lousy Record Keeping".