ExpertExperience - Digital Asset Management Community

Best Practices for Building Metadata and Taxonomy

A recent question was posted: "I am involved in creating a DAM solution for my company. The asset ranges from video, arts, images and photographs etc. I can say that the assets would be similar to what CORBIS, Getty Images have in place today. I would like to know is there any best practices for building Metadata and Taxonomy; What kind of architecture that I should follow etc. Please provide me some links and resources."

Seth Earley's Answer:  Here are a couple of links to start with:

Taxonomy Community of Practice: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxoCoP/

Metadata Harvesting Tool

A question was recently posted: "I am looking for metadata harvesting and data mining services to gather and organize metadata from years of spreadsheet data plus information from external image vendors' WebPages to input into a DAM with legacy assets. Can you recommend some resources for these service providers?"

Seth Earley's Answer:  Interesting that you ask.  About two years ago, I had asked one of my consultants to go through a web site and harvest terms from the pages.  I was interested in metadata on pages themselves but also in extracting the terms from various kinds of files for inclusion in a taxonomy. We poked around on the web and found some shareware but it did not exactly meet our needs.  So, like any good developer, he rolled his own.