My brother, an ambitious hobby photographer, asked me to set up a website for him showcasing his photography. He had already bought XML Photography Template, a Flash app configured through (usually static) XML files. (No, I’m not a friend of Flash-only websites, I hope we can fix this later…) Photos are best handled by our […]
Usage rights for images – and other types of assets like video – are a tricky, but important part of Digital Asset Management. Am I allowed to use this image for my publication, under which conditions, and will I have to pay for it? Are there any restrictions? A DAM system must help answer these […]
A typical DC-X system receives data from lots of different sources: News agencies, editorial systems, files in hotfolders, e-mails, RSS feeds. So there is a lot of code that deals with parsing various data formats and inserting content, metadata and files into DC-X. In DC4, all of that code was written in PHP and doing […]
Thesauri and lists of keywords are stored by DC-X in its topic map – a set of database tables modeled after the XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 standard. For an introduction to topic maps, see the wonderful article The TAO of Topic Maps by Steve Pepper. So far we have implemented merely half of the […]
Tags are an important element of so-called „Web 2.0“. In addition to changing the metadata of the document itself, DC-X allows the user to add tags to the document – a great way of organizing documents for personal or departmental use (and you don’t need „update permissions“ on a document to add tags to it). […]
An unlimited number of publications can be set up in DC-X, along with metadata related to the publication itself (name, short name, platform, aggregation type, publisher, ISSN, eISSN, hierarchical list of sections/subsections or web channels). A document can be assigned any number of publication data records so that you can track how often it has […]
The „assets“ (as in „Digital Asset Management“), the main entities of any DAM system, are called „documents“ in DC-X: Database records containing text content along with structured metadata, and with zero or more attached files (stored in the filesystem, not in the database). All content is stored in Unicode, encoded as UTF-8, meaning that almost […]
[We’re currently preparing a Technical Whitepaper on our new DC-X product, and will write parts of it on this blog. Feedback is welcome. Please note: While we wouldn’t usually edit regular blog posts, we’ll probably modify the parts of this series regularly to mirror the evolving whitepaper.] This chapter summarizes the most important features and […]
