By: Erik Vlietinck
Fri, January 18, 2008 - 6:19:00

http://www.poundhill.com

Most users of Adobe products know XMP from displaying the EXIF metadata that comes with a digital camera image file in Bridge or Photoshop. All Adobe applications have the XMP metadata panel, and professional users will surely use the standard panels to fill in copyright and ownership metadata. Less commonly known is the fact that in InDesign, XMP can be used to drive a JDF workflow through integration with a database, for example.

It is no exaggeration to say that metadata is what makes cross-media publishing projects possible. Without metadata, about 90% of the functionality needed for efficient cross-media document design, authoring, and routing would be lost. In short: metadata is the “blood” that feeds the workflow and XMP is an important vessel to transport the metadata.

XMP is customisable, and it is in more than one way. The first level of customisation happens when you’re writing cstom panels. When you do, you’re using the available panels that Adobe provides for with the standard XMP system. A second level is to use the XMP API and write your own program that hooks up XMP with other systems. It’s here that JDF workflows and such high-end publishing and prepress capabilities kick in. However, just as with Job Jackets in QuarkXPress, XMP development is not an easy task. In fact, even the writing of custom panels is not something you’ll be doing in a couple of seconds. There’s quite a steep learning curve.

One solution is to dive in and learn how to program XMP yourself, but most designers and users of Adobe Creative Suite products may find that a bit over the edge. That’s a pity, because XMP certainly is a very powerful functionality built into all CS3 applications --not just InDesign. An alternative to the do-it-yourself approach is to use an XMP development environment like the one provided for by Pound Hill Software’s MetaGrove.

The MetaGrove Suite for Adobe Creative Suite 3 provides standardized cross-platform and cross-application metadata consistency, server-based support for controlled vocabularies, and the ability to automatically enforce compliance with corporate and departmental standards. The MetaGrove Suite toolset facilitates source file re-purposing and extends the life cycle of digital assets by encouraging wide-spread acceptance and implementation of metadata as part of the day-to-day workflow.

The MetaGrove System

Established in 2001, Pound Hill Software develops, markets and supports software tools that allow cross-media publishers to use XMP in ways that go much deeper than what the default panels to tag, identify and access media files in Adobe Creative Suite applications offer.

MetaGrove Software is divided into two parts: MetaGrove Developer and Plugins. MetaGrove Developer is used to create custom panels and adjust them to personal or corporate specifications. MetaGrove Plugins is used to open panels made by MetaGrove Developer through Adobe Applications. Basically you need Developer to create the panel and the Plugin to open the panel. There are different Plugins required for different Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, InCopy, Acrobat, InDesign).

But why should you deploy an additional level of technological complexity in order to fully support metadata through XMP, I wondered. The answer paradoxically is to make it more simple and accessible.

In an e-mail interview I had with Bob Weaver, Pound Hill Software Sales Manager and Jury Balta, the company’s Product Marketing Manager, both said that no matter how powerful MetaGrove can be, it has been created with the novice user in mind. “It has a drag-and-drop user interface. You can create a completely custom made panel within minutes. If you want to apply dynamic data, then you would need some advanced skills: for dynamic data implementation, you do need to be familiar with SQL database quary language and PHP,” Jury Balta said.

Standards Body Compliance With XMP

Whereas XMP in InDesign can be used to create a Ghent WorkGroup compliant document right in InDesign (early in the publishing workflow) rather than depend on Acrobat to preflight the document and risk to have it bounce back and forth between the layout designer and the printing department, you can’t accomplish this feat without some heavy programming.

With MetaGrove, it should be easier. You would have to set up a Ghent WorkGroup panel structure in MetaGrove Developer. Instead of creating text inputs, you could simply enable drop-down menus with already populated values --a boost for the user who doesn’t have to think about all the possible values for all thirteen possible output scenarios anymore.

But what if you would like to exchange this data with an external database, perhaps to directly preflight the InDesign document? Bob Weaver: “If you want to go further and have the values stored in outside databases (SQL), you can also dynamically connect it to pre-populate the field you want.”

The dynamic data feature has other possible implementations as well. The MetaGrove dynamic data feature is the ability to connect to an external database source and add your metadata. Jury Balta: “There are many features that come with dynamic data such as automated population of fields, usage of intranet or internet, etc. Dialogues by themselves can be dynamic so that clients from London and New York can log in and edit the dialogue on-the-fly. Another important feature is the ability to add up to 15 panels for one file. So you could have one required panel for graphic designers, one for the manager level, one for the general manager, etc.”

When I asked about Pound Hill Software’s idea of the market size, Jury Balta said he believes the market is very large as there are many Adobe users worldwide. “The popularity and allocation of metadata files is growing and MetaGrove is at the forefront of metadata technology. To be more specific, our main market are advertising agencies, museums, government agencies, and even individual users,” he said.

Pound Hill and MetaGrove also recently became and ESRI partner and can now pull data to tag PDF’s and maps that are viewed within Adobe applications.

When Adobe implemented the XMP system, metadata wasn’t as important as it is today. Adobe’s move back then was especially important to accommodate for EXIF and IPTC information in a structured manner. Today, the XMP system is a potential front-end for complete workflow automation and for enforcing standards-body compliance. As those requirements become ever more important, so will XMP and the products that allow it to be deployed fast and efficiently.