Digital Asset Ecosystems (eBook)

Rethinking crowds and clouds

Tobias Blanke (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2014 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-1-78063-382-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Digital asset management is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Near universal availability of high-quality web-based assets makes it important to pay attention to the new world of digital ecosystems and what it means for managing, using and publishing digital assets. The Ecosystem of Digital Assets reflects on these developments and what the emerging 'web of things' could mean for digital assets. The book is structured into three parts, each covering an important aspect of digital assets. Part one introduces the emerging ecosystems of digital assets. Part two examines digital asset management in a networked environment. The third part covers media ecosystems. - Looks to the future of digital asset management, focussing on the next generation web - Includes up-to date developments in the field, crowd sourcing, and cloud services - Details case studies to demonstrate how generic requirements are met in particular cases

Tobias Blanke is teaching senior lecturer and director of the MA in Digital Asset Management at the Centre for e-Research, King's College London. His background is in informatics and philosophy, with a PhD in German philosophy from the Free University of Berlin, and a second PhD in Computing Science from Glasgow University. Tobias has worked at Credite Suisse First Boston in the City of London, at the Free University of Berlin, and at several smaller companies, prior to joining King's College.

Inhalt

Cover 
1 
Digital Asset Ecosystems : Rethinking crowds and clouds 
4 
Copyright 
5 
Contents 6
List of figures 8
About the author 10
1: 
12 
2: 
18 
The new world of digital assets 19
Crowds and clouds, and how they work together 24
Digital ecosystems 32
The practice of digital ecosystems in media and publishing 37
3: 
46 
A web for machines and humans alike 46
Adding intelligence: crowds and clouds 57
Working the crowd 64
4: 
72 
Open content and its effective use 73
Closed environments and walled gardens 81
Open environments 91
5: 
98 
Big data and digital ecosystems: theories and models 98
A brief history of big data 105
Applications in the big data ‘gold rush’ 113
Critiques and limitations of big data 121
6: 
130 
The new division of labour between humans and computers 130
Free and collective labour 139
Network value 146
7: 
156 
References 166
Index 188

Textauszug

2

Background

Abstract:

This book aims to reposition digital assets and media in the global workflows and divisions of labour. We are trying to understand the emergence of new digital asset practices, and how digital ecosystems and their crowds and clouds are instrumental for the production and consumption of digital assets. To this end, we first have to explore what digital assets are. Nowadays, it is not enough to think of digital asset management as just delivering order to an otherwise unorganised heap of digital objects in an organisation. The new emerging, interconnected global workflows of the digital economy need to be considered. Crowds and clouds help us understand these workflows, which means that we can describe how digital assets and digital media are prepared for production and consumption.

We consider crowds as a form of global human ubiquitous computing. As such, they help us understand the evolution of digital assets. To us, clouds are much more than what they are commonly known for, such as storage spaces in cyberspace. They need to be understood as the most prominent incarnation of the development of the web into an application platform connected to ubiquitous computing resources, which are heavily interlinked.

The chapter finally considers two case studies from digital publishing and digital media where crowds and clouds already work together in the new global workflow around digital assets.

Key words

digital ecosystem

crowds

clouds

digital assets

digital media

division of work

pathologies of big data

The new world of digital assets

This book positions digital assets within the emerging world of digital networks. While digital networks are now part of our everyday experience, digital assets are far less so and have largely escaped attention. On the most general level, they are digital things with value, digitally produced and realised in a digital consumption. If we accept this definition of digital assets, this book will be about how values are realised in networks of consumers and producers of digital objects.

Such consumption can happen in a market setting. This is generally discussed under the concept of monetisation of assets (Austerberry, 2012). Monetisation is an important part of the realisation of digital assets, but we are less interested in it here. Another way of consuming digital assets happens at every transition within the asset life cycle. There are many definitions of this digital life cycle of objects, but they mostly converge on at least creating, managing, discovering and (re) using as essential components of any digital object’s life. These are the ‘basic stages content moves through from creation to providing ongoing preservation, management and access over time’ (LeFurgy, 2012).

Digital asset value stems today not just from direct consumption or monetisation, but also from how digital assets are repurposed in this life cycle in networks. This is a very different way of repurposing their use than traditional sources of digital asset management (DAM) theory would have thought of. Austerberry (2012), one of the main sources for digital asset management theory, offers the following view on the meaning of digital asset value:

What gives an asset value? If it can be resold, then the value is obvious. However, it can also represent a monetary asset, if it can be cost-effectively repurposed and then incorporated into new material.

(Austerberry, 2012: 5)

This idea needs to be amended, once we take into account that digital asset consumption is not linear and follows a more complex life cycle that is dynamic and evolving in global networks. This chapter will start from the traditional definition of digital assets, but will also present why this definition is not sufficient any more. We investigate how digital assets integrate in digital networks in their life cycle, how they move from place to place and from system to system, and how they pass through the hands of ‘dedicated communities’ and are, in this way, one of the foundation blocks of something we call the digital asset ecosystem, which we shall define later in this chapter.

In the discipline of digital asset management, a digital asset is often considered to be an enriched digital file. Austerberry (2012) starts his introductory book, Digital Asset Management, with a discussion about how digital files become a dominant form of content in an enterprise. ‘Content creators and publishers are looking to digital asset management (DAM) to improve productivity and to provide sensible management in a file-based production environment’ (Austerberry, 2012: 1). Files are enriched with metadata in order to, for instance, describe an object’s identity.

According to this standard definition, digital assets are firstly considered to be files and have a value on their own, as Jacobsen et al. (2005) also state:

The first definition (asset = file + rights) is more widely used in the context of assets that have a certain value on their own. For example, think of an MP3 file of a song from your favorite band. From a business perspective, it is useless as long as you don’t have the right to do something with it…

(Jacobsen et al., 2005: 2)

Jacobsen et al. go on to state that, secondly, digital assets are digital files amended with metadata. They consider this second definition of digital assets to be complementary to the first, as digital assets’ metadata is used to describe not only the content of the file, but also the rights attached to it.

Both definitions in these introductory digital asset management books bring together technical elements and conceptual ones. A digital file becomes an asset only because it is enriched with additional information that enables its consumption. It has value and so on. This combination of elements is what interests us, too, but we do not agree with Jacobsen et al. (2005) on the technical dimension of digital assets. Throughout this book, we shall introduce many digital assets that are much more than files, unless one considers everything durable in a computer to be a file. While there is some truth in this, the definition would become too generic. We prefer to speak of digital objects instead of files. Unfortunately, Jacobsen et al. also do not follow up on their second insight that there are conceptual elements in the definition of digital assets. Digital assets are not just files/objects, but only those that are made for consumption by others, that have the correct rights attached to them and the right metadata to find and access them. Metadata has no purpose in itself, but only in the (future) consumption by others, as Gartner et al. (2008) demonstrate.

Jacobsen et al. (2005) produce a workable definition for their purposes, which is to investigate the life of digital assets in a digital asset management (DAM) system. Core components of DAM systems include a repository to manage and store digital assets, a metadata-based catalogue with a search engine for retrieving assets, and finally more advanced features, such as rights management and workflow engines to organise the execution of tasks (Arthur, 2005). With this set-up, DAM systems are designed to manage unstructured information that most likely does not have a predefined data model. This information needs to be enriched in ways that suit the consumption by designated, often rather specific communities. Its most common form is documents of all kinds, either multimedia ones or plain old text ones, where metadata is an essential part of this enrichment. As unstructured information is the predominant form of data in the world, DAM systems in their various forms have therefore become an essential part of the global digital life. Eighty per cent of business information is unstructured (Grimes, 2011), and this percentage only grows with the integration of more and more business cases in the digital world.

Finally, one needs to consider that both introductory DAM books discussed here were published in the mid-2000s. The general use case for digital asset management was then to bring order to the digital files in an organisation, often by using a centralisation strategy (Arthur, 2005). The organisations’ general use case in books like Implementing a Digital Asset Management System are photo and animation companies that would like to organise their multimedia assets. Digital asset management’s return on investment in systemising digital assets is consistency across the organisation, quicker and controlled access to all its files, durable backup, etc. This book will go further and investigate how digital assets appear in the whole network of an organisation’s activities on the intranet and Internet, and how they are not just part of a larger product such as picture assets for a digital animation.

DAM systems have evolved from back-office systems to components of the front-office value creation environments (Austerberry, 2012). In many ways, digital assets are actually the objects that keep an organisation together across various digital environments, as we...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.7.2014
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Buchhandel / Bibliothekswesen
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Wirtschaftsinformatik
• ISBN-10: 1-78063-382-3 / 1780633823
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78063-382-4 / 9781780633824