Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Content?

The only way to capitalize on your enterprise content is to maximize your metadata.

What is metadata?
Metadata is loosely defined as information about information. We use metadata everyday in our daily lives, we just don’t realize it. Common metadata fields are: Title, author, origination, date of publication, etc.

Why Should You Care About Metadata?
The quality and quantity of your metadata matters. With better metadata, searching becomes easier, browsing becomes more efficient, and organizational knowledge becomes more effective. With more data about your information comes streamlined enterprise operations. Redundant tasks can be eliminated. Enterprise knowledge becomes widespread.

What’s the Difference Between PDF’s and PDF/As?
In an acronym: XMP

Where PDFs are limited by their metadata fields and have seperate metadata files, PDF/As posses nearly 200 editable metadata fields within the file.

Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) allows you to embed metadata into the file itself. XMP provides a standard way of capturing, processing, and exchanging information about digital files that is open-standards based, expandable and most important, travels with the file itself.

This capability allows ArchivalWare to be updated using a digital asset/digital object centric approach. Conventional content management systems utilize a database to link the metadata to the digital file. Using XMP technology, ArchivalWare can ingest one file and index both the file content as well as the metadata without a mechanism to connect the two pieces of data.

When properly architected metadata updates immediately modify the XMP data housed in the file allowing portability at any time. While XMP is commonly used in PDF/A files XMP can be used in other file formats, such as JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, HTML, TIFF, Adobe Illustrator, PSD, PostScript, and Encapsulated PostScript.

XMP Key Benefits
• Enables creation of “smart asset packages” that retain rich content and metadata and are oblivious to software application, device, and database system migration over time.
• Extends the content lifecycle by being able to locate, repurpose and migrate source files across multiple versions and editions
• Provides a mechanism for easy file sharing (Electronic Document Delivery) and transfer of files across products and vendor platforms
• XMP is based on open standards
• Enables more elegant Digital Preservation initiatives and strategies to be realized
• Allows a better schema to be developed for system backups
• Solves a multitude of problems concerning the obsolescence of proprietary vendor-specific metadata databases and content management systems