On December 9th, 2015, Margaret Warren, Demian Hess and I will be doing a webinar hosted by the DAM Guru Program: How the Semantic Web Will Affect Digital Asset Management. You’re welcome to join us, or watch the recording later if you cannot attend live.

If you’re already using Linked Data in a DAM context, I’d love to hear from you soon. Maybe I can work some of your examples into the webinar!

I’m not an expert, but I’ve been thinking about this (and doing some experiments) for years. If you want to do some reading on the topic, here’s a timeline of articles about the intersection of DAM and Semantic Web / Linked Data:

Mike Linksvayer (2007) – Digital Asset Management and the Semantic Web: “Microsoft has apparently gone the next several steps by basing Microsoft Media Manager on RDF and OWL. […] IMM RDF model overcomes traditional barriers to metadata sharing between external systems.”

Naresh Sarwan (2012) – Semantic Web: The Key To More Meaningful Large Scale Digital Asset Management?: “Semantic techniques are likely to become more important as the volume of media stored in DAM systems increases exponentially.”

Nigel Cliffe (2012) – Your Guide to the DAM Road Map Part 4: “Semantic web technologies will find their way into the DAM experience. The development of data about data as well as documents on the web that machines can process, transform and assemble, will enable new value to be gained from that data in really useful ways.”

Margaret Warren (2013) – A new system which can help with protecting images from becoming orphans: “[ImageSnippets] approaches metadata authoring and editing from an entirely new point of view using linked data techniques. Not only does the linked data tagging offer improved querying (which can be experimented with in the application) but the techniques used also enable innovative methods for the storage and transport of an image and it's metadata.”

Ralph Windsor (2013) – Applying Linked Data Concepts To Derive A Global Image Search Protocol (in response to my post): “I suspect that both commercial interests and the complexity of getting everyone in the world to both agree and implement something like this might mean it is some time before it becomes a reality, but the benefits to image suppliers and users alike are clear and that may generate the required momentum to see some gradual progress towards it over time.”

Ralph Windsor (2013) – The Building Blocks Of Digital Asset Management Interoperability: “None of the methods I have described are complex to implement into DAM products as vendors either use them already or (in the case of the Linked Data techniques) they are fairly simple modifications to existing outputs used to populate existing APIs.”

Me (2014) – Web of information vs DAM, DM, CM, KM silos: “We could find a clever, generic way to link information from various systems together so that we can “surf” it in any direction. Linked data in the form of HTML+RDFa is a great way to do this.”

James Rourke (2014) – DAM Report: Henry Stewart London Conference: “Mark [Davey] spoke on the subject of where DAM is going, postulating that DAM will morph into a knowledge based platform, with assets and content being delivered in new ways. […] It was suggested that schema.org should become an industry standard, so that we are all speaking the same language.”

Demian Hess (2014) – DAM and Flexible Metadata Using Semantics: “Digital asset metadata is a challenge because of its variety. […] Several new types of databases have emerged that provide the flexible solutions that businesses require. While document-oriented databases have commanded the most attention, semantic “triple stores” have been gaining adherents.”

Mark Davey (2015) – What has DAM got to do with Web 3.0?: “I will be discussing the future of DAM as it relates to Web 3.0 and the social-network-infused web of data. Exploring DAM's place in the new machine-readable, knowledge-based economy.” (See also his funny video.)

Kim Davis (2015) – The state of DAM: digital asset management in 2015: “DAM, for [Mark] Davey, is "the beating heart of the semantic web." A "highly controlled vocabulary" should power search, and without the expertise of a librarian to implement that, your DAM will fail.”

Me (2015) – RDF and schema.org for DAM interoperability: “I suggest that we encourage the DAM community to move towards the schema.org vocabulary in an RDF syntax.”

If you want to dig deeper, the DAM Foundation lists several posts tagged with Linked Data or Semantic Web, and DAM News has a Semantic Web category.

Update: Ralph Windsor – Webinar: How the Semantic Web Will Affect DAM, 9th December 2015, 10am PT: “The Semantic Web remains the richest source (and currently largely unexplored) opportunity for metadata innovation in Digital Asset Management.”

Update: Mark Davey (2016) – Where DAM has been and where it's going: “I believe that DAM will become the beating heart of the Semantic Web.”