As the supervisor of the video repository at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, she's one of the people responsible for cataloguing all the video that's shot during a 10-day shuttle mission--as much as 200 hours of digital information.
When NASA wants to access specific parts of the footage, Stewart's department has to find them, which means the video must be carefully digitised and consistently catalogued. Convera's RetrievalWare software to store and catalogue the content, Stewart's group lists the "who, what, when, and where" of what's going on, creating a file of metadata (data about the data, essentially) so the video can be easily retrieved.
"We need very exact searches," says Stewart. "When NASA's partners call, they need everything we have, and we can't afford to miss anything."
Though NASA is working with the richest media around, it's facing the same challenge as most corporations: how to catalogue, organize, search, and retrieve digital information. As the Web becomes a channel for the distribution of information, all this digital information has become an asset--something companies can license, resell, or simply rely upon as a competitive advantage.
Raiders of the lost data
The software that handles this data, known as digital asset management (DAM) software, is the sibling of document management, content management, and search engines, but it has its own challenges. A corporation's data, taken in its entirety, resembles the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark--text, audio, video, and graphics in all shapes and sizes. The data could be structured database input, unstructured PowerPoint presentations, even computer code.
"There are a bunch of technologies vying for a piece of DAM," says IDC analyst Josh Duhl, who cites a dozen companies that have strategies relating to DAM or enterprise content management (ECM). These include: Canto on the desktop; IBM, Computer Associates, and Oracle on the high end; and Interwoven, Verity, and Vignette, which target the specific content management and retrieval tasks within the enterprise. "Some people talk about accessing information from ERP and CRM systems, but we're a long way from an integrated global ECM system," says Duhl.
Because many industries use rich media but aren't managing it effectively, companies other than traditional media outlets--such as retail organisations with advertising issues and government agencies with paper-retrieval issues--are considering DAM. Because digital asset management is so closely related to other information management technologies, a number of vendors have already solved the issues of cataloguing, architecture, and integration with systems that may meet your needs as well, whether they're as simple as digitising paper or as out-of-this-world as NASA's video cataloguing.
