Interoperability Standards And The Future Of Digital Asset Management

Andreas Mockenhaupt Director of Professional Services at DAM vendors, Canto has contributed a feature article to DAM News: Why Interoperability Standards Are So Critical To The Future Of Digital Asset Management.  The article describes the OASIS-sponsored CMIS4DAM standard which has been in-progress since September 2013:

“The concept behind CMIS4DAM is to create something along the lines of a universal API, allowing those DAM systems that are compliant to easily gain access to the metadata that they need without performing integration work. The overriding goal of the CMIS4DAM committee is to make it easier for enterprise customers to achieve the results they desire with regard to DRM. A primary objective of the new standard is therefore to address the idea that DAM solutions require a more adaptable framework. And first and foremost, that framework needs to be able to accommodate, expedite and facilitate metadata interoperability between platforms.” [Read More]

I have some prior history with this initiative, although I am no longer an actively involved with it now.  An issue which (in my opinion) still needs to be resolved with CMIS4DAM is the high cost of participation by virtue of the necessity to be a member of OASIS (at a cost of $7,000 for corporate schemes).  In addition, I don’t think the implicit assumption behind the name that DAM is a subset of ECM is an accurate one (especially as DAM pre-dates that field by a decade).  If the fees are justifiable for your organisation, however, then it could be worth investigating further and Andreas’ article provides a decent introduction to the subject and summary of the key issues.

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