Asset Utility

Over the next few years we will see huge growth in the amount of digital content & media. This is arising not only in media and entertainment businesses, but also in enterprises and institutions, and for consumers. Today's tools are not powerful and flexible enough to keep up with the volume of digital assets and the variety of requirements. As a result new platforms and services are required to support the efficient capture, storage, management and publication of digital assets.

Problem Addressed
Current software solutions for large scale digital asset management are proprietary monolithic systems, limited in functionality, difficult to deploy and integrate, and expensive to manage and maintain. Also the compute and storage infrastructure which underpins these asset management systems is tailored to suite particular applications and can be difficult to extend and adapt.

Our work is focused on an open framework for digital assets which enables the flexible integration of best-of-breed tools and services, together with a set of services to manage content across a variety of underlying storage systems.

Our Contribution
As part of HP Labs Digital Media Systems research programme, we have already created world-class solutions and infrastructure for large scale asset management & preservation - ARKive and DSpace (see other research projects reported elsewhere).

We are now leveraging those systems and experiences into a new generation of common infrastructure and services for managing digital content - an Asset Utility. Our research includes...

• Tools and services to flexibly manage digital assets through their lifecycle across a variety of storage systems
• Open asset stores with common models for digital content to enable the exchange of assets across disparate tools
• A service interoperability framework for digital asset applications and services, to enable the seamless combination of the best-of-breed components
• A set of common content services for digital assets which can be leveraged across a range of application contexts

Contact:
Andrew.Nelson@hp.com