OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services for Digital Asset Management (CMIS4DAM) TC

The Content Management Interoperability Services for Digital Asset Management (CMIS4DAM) TC aims to resolve interoperability challenges facing Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution providers and their end users by leveraging the existing CMIS standard already adopted by the Enterprise Content Management sector.

CMIS is a comprehensive standard, however the specification’s scope and scale sometimes makes it difficult for DAM vendors to benefit from adopting it; many require only small subsets of CMIS capabilities, and many have limited time and staff resources to devote to understanding CMIS in sufficient detail to identify and implement those parts they can use. This is unfortunate because for each type of vendor, elements of the CMIS standard can enable important, needed interoperability capabilities.

Further, the range of alternative metadata standards used by the rich media stored inside DAM solutions also requires a more adaptable framework that can share the common elements of a widely adopted standard like CMIS while leaving open the opportunity to expand its scope on a case-by-case basis. For example, a photo management solution may need to interoperate with general CMIS Enterprise Content repositories as well as with photo-specific metadata standards such as IPTC or PLUS, while a video-focused media asset management application might substitute the latter for audio-visual standards such as PBCORE. The range and significance of each of these associated endeavors and the necessity for a given solution provider to integrate with them cannot be accurately predicted and will change over time.

In addition to enabling metadata interoperability, a further objective of CMIS4DAM is to define a series of common operations which compliant DAM solutions will respond to in a predictable and consistent fashion. As with metadata, the range and scope of these is intended to be flexible and extensible, such that individual applications can support certain functions to a greater or lesser extent according to areas in which each specializes. A core or baseline series of operations will be defined as part of this activity.

CMIS4DAM is intended to offer a layer of abstraction between CMIS and a range of external metadata classification protocols, together with common operations used within the DAM domain, especially as they relate to individual classes of rich media assets such as images and video. The purpose is to assimilate these models and to use CMIS as the conduit to enable interoperability between them. The goal of CMIS4DAM is to enhance the cohesion between different DAM solutions and provide a more flexible protocol that is easier for a wider range of participants to engage with than the core CMIS standard alone offers.

CMIS4DAM needs to provide a flexible and structured framework which can be rapidly implemented at a basic level to enable widespread participation, while at the same time enabling a wide-ranging series of related standards to be connected into it on an as-needs basis. It is anticipated, therefore, that a major element of the work of the Committee will be education oriented to meet the first objective, and the second may need to be accommodated with Subcommittees to address the specific needs of individual standards and the characteristics necessary to facilitate their integration into CMIS4DAM. The scope of this TC is to provide a framework rather than to prescribe a finite list of external metadata standards that should be adopted.

The TC will develop example CMIS mappings targeted at DAM applications to assist DAM solution developers to rapidly access assets (represented as documents) in existing CMIS-compliant repositories.

The TC will propose an initial list of candidate external standards (with a specific interest in those relating to asset metadata) which will be included in the first iteration of the standard documentation.

The TC will reach out to bodies responsible for additional external standards that may be utilized by DAM with the aim of encouraging their participation.

The TC will solicit opinions from DAM vendors, industry associations, and journals to define a baseline set of operations or functions which compliant DAM solutions should support.

The TC will define protocols that allow the baseline operations to be extended on a selective basis by system developers while still allowing them to maintain a compliant solution.

The TC will develop a documented procedure for incorporation of new DAM-related metadata standards so that this process can become more efficient and incorporate best practice methods (as well as any subsequent refinement of these same procedures).

• A document describing the specific use cases of CMIS4DAM that the TC plans to address in its work product
• Introductory core CMIS implementation models intended for managers and technical practitioners that explain how to implement CMIS4DAM at a basic level
• Advanced implementation models and frameworks that expand upon the introductory items to include coverage of any initial metadata standards encompassed by CMIS4DAM
• Terminology guidelines and glossary (to be integrated with the DAM Glossary being developed at damglossary.org)
• Documentation describing core operations and instructions for extending them to support specialized functionality in a compliant manner

This TC will operate under the Non-Assertion IPR mode as defined in the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy effective 21 June 2012.

DAM solution providers and end users

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution providers who have implemented CMIS and wish to integrate with a broader range of DAM solutions

The CMIS4DAM TC operates and publishes its work products in English.