Adobe saw the rise of interest in the semantic web and promptly started investing heavily in a metadata initiative. It elevated Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) to the status of core Adobe technology, along with Adobe PDF and Postscript. The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. With XMP, desktop applications and back-end publishing systems gain a common method for capturing, sharing, and leveraging this valuable metadata opening the door for more efficient job processing, workflow automation, and rights management, among many other possibilities. Currently, Adobe is allowing users to preview version 4 of its Adobe XMP Toolkit.

But there’s more: a company called Pound Hill Software has released a complete software toolkit at the 11th Digital Asset Management (DAM) Symposium in Los Angeles on November 14-15, 2005. MetaGrove is the world’s first integrated suite of software tools for Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform. The comprehensive, robust toolkit consists of MetaGrove Developer, MetaGrove Plug-ins for Adobe’s Creative Suite, and MetaGrove XTension for QuarkXPress. 

Extensible Metadata Platform can help businesses to reduce production costs and create new revenue-generating products. Just as RSS serves for computers to read metadata that is coded according to a worldwide standard, there can be meaning --semantics-- in the sense that logical tests can be carried out without human intervention. The key term is semantic as this is the crucial concept in the semantic web.

Extensible Metadata Platform is not the first attempt to associate properties to digital assets. The newspaper industry has a number of examples (like Adsend) that work with metadata, but the big difference is that XMP is based on the worldwide W3C recognized standards XML and RDF. XML is extensible so that users can add or even create their own metadata sets, templates, etc. With systems such as Adsend, there is little or nothing that helps users customize the system for their own purposes. RDF was designed for any web resource, while Adobe’s implementation was specifically developed for Adobe files, but that’s about the only part of the standard that has been made “proprietary”, so to speak.

Because the structure is the same, Extensible Metadata Platform can easily draw on standard metadata category sets, such as the one developed by the Dublin Core Initiative. The result is built-in support for what is commonly known as the Library Card for the Web. While the Dublin Core community defined the terms and wrote the documentation for the RDF implementation, Adobe could just include support for this metadata categorisation as part of the standard implementation of XMP. Such categorisation is called a schema in both the RDF and XMP context.

Extensible Metadata Platform builds on RDF

Instead of developing its own metadata system, Adobe had the luminous idea of following the RDF lead. That proved to be both less expensive, more efficient, and better for the users of the Extensible Metadata Platform. Another benefit is that a number of engineers have already built, and are building, metadata structures for their domains, which Adobe can just tap into.

By adopting the RDF model, Adobe and the users of the systems gain from any application set of agent software that will manage information and commercial exchange automatically by reading the structured metadata and using the values to control routing and transactions. Many Digital Asset Management systems today provide such agent software.

Desktop Publishers benefit from the system by being able to personalize the files they create. Pound Hill Software even offers a free program, called MetaSampler, which allows you to create your own metadata panels for use in the Adobe Creative Suite File Info dialogue windows, without any need for programming at all.

The next step is to use the information to enhance workflow productivity within a paper or magazine. One of the most frequent applications is specialised dfatabase structures for managing inventories of different kinds of digital assets. Increasingly, system vendors support Extensible Metadata Platform for this purpose. Special applications can also be built using either open source database applications or mass market products, such as Filemaker Pro, with a simple scripted interface.