CMIS4DAM Draft Technical Committee Charter
Those readers with good memories might recall there were some moves from standards organisation, OASIS, last year to establish a DAM metadata interoperability standard which could integrate the numerous media related metadata protocols encountered in DAM under the banner of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). As ever with achieving consensus in the IT industry (and especially with a fragmented market like DAM) progress has been slow. Despite this, OASIS have been both patient and persistent in encouraging everyone to get to the starting line and a draft technical committee charter has now been prepared. Copies of the CMIS4DAM draft technical committee charter are now available to download here:
Draft-Proposal-for-New-OASIS-Technical-Committee
There is an email discussion listserv (see end of article) for anyone interested in getting involved. This is currently a draft only and it requires the sponsorship of five people from at least two OASIS organisational members.
We will be reporting back with progress on CMIS4DAM. One of the earliest tasks will be the preparation of some frameworks that DAM developers can use to integrate with CMIS. Interoperability in DAM is one of these subjects that a lot of people like talking about, but in a similar fashion to physical exercise, the reality of getting into the activity itself has rather fewer volunteers. A point to emerge from the discussion last year is that the basics are quite a lot easier than the core CMIS documentation initially gives the impression (whether you use a library like Apache Chemistry or just do it ‘raw’ direct to a CMIS compliant app via http).
In DAM, especially, my expectation is that most vendor development resources are walled up behind their in-trays and the phrase ‘a few spare hours’ is liable to strike fear and dread into the hearts and minds of those who are best placed to make this happen. As an industry, however, we collectively owe it to ourselves to make progress with interoperability standards as DAM is one enterprise software market where the effort to reward ratio is genuinely compelling and too good an opportunity to pass up.
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