Part 2. The Foundations of your Metadata Structure

A DAM can be as simple as an image repository or as complex as a mission-critical business solution. When having a lot of assets, having an advanced metadata structure is crucial.

This blog post is Part 2 of a three part blogpost series. We will guide you from laying the foundation of your metadata structure (Part 1 and 2) to introducing complex business rules and automation (Part 3). 

Part 2. Define and lay your metadata foundation

To set up your metadata structure you have to first lay the foundation as a user and enterprise and also ensure you have flexibility to set it up in a way that benefits the unique needs of your business. This includes:

• How you define assets and asset types
• How you determine metadata and metadata structures
• How you set-up and, over time, manage such metadata and structures. (You may want to have smart functions, e.g. AI, for the population of certain metadata etc.)

Here are the steps to do it:

01. Define your asset types

Define what different types of Digital Assets you have in your organization. The purpose of this is to define the metadata structure for each type of asset in that specific category.

A few examples the variety of assets an organization can have when it comes to images:

• Marketing images (may include product photos, lifestyle photos, brand photos)
• Operational product photos
• Spare part photos
  
• After-sales photos
• Internal / external images
• HR and personnel related photos

02. Make sure your digital assets contains the right information

Once you have defined the different types of digital assets it is important to set rules to make sure that the different assets contain sufficient, good and correct information.

For example: 

A product photo should contain product ID, size, relationships to other assets, specific product USP, validity date of the product and the asset itself.

A product marketing image should always contain keywords, when it is suitable to use, campaign information and corporate values conveyed.

Employee photos should include first name, last name, consent form etc. 

Now that you have defined and have a vision for your metadata structure, you can start planning for automated and complex workflows. In part 3 of this blog series we will walk through how you set up and introduce business rules and automated workflows. Stay tuned by subscribing to our blogposts!

Take me to part 3 

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