I was delighted to be invited to be part of the panel discussing processes that span creation, production, management and delivery of digital assets today.

Panel moderator was Andrew Salop one of the key creators of the XMP initiative that seeks to standardise the way metadata is embedded in different digital assets. His key point was that metadata should follow a digital asset through a complete "supply chain".

I gave a brief outline of Amnesty's work and the materials that we produce -- websites, the annual report, campaigning materials. I demo'ed some screenshots from Adam and described the way our still images are driven through the workflow process by the metadata. ie. An asset is published automatically once it is keyworded and the rights metadata is added. I also demonstrated how assets can be found easily on the Intranet.

Some other interesting points that arose..

No one believed that the "single source" system was actually achieveable. People thought that it was best to avoid tightly coupling solutions and instead focus on a integration between repositories.

Hans Bolten from Woodwing in particular talked about how Woodwing was working to integrate systems with webservices.