Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Taylor Venable <taylor AT metasyntax.net>]

Greetings all,

In a world where creative works are increasingly being represented in
a digital-only format, it is important to be able to recognize the
relevant data about these works -- metadata such as the originator of
the work, the time of its production, and the rights under which it is
made available.  To that end, the idea of digital asset management[1],
the cataloguing and categorization of digital information, was born.

Under the helpful guidance of Nathan Yergler, a team of programmers at
Indiana University, Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) has been
exploring the fundamentals of digital asset management in the form of
an application which can catalogue and search for metadata within the
known database.  The team, consisting now of Jason Baker, Michael
Mattax, and Taylor Venable, would now like your help in determining
some of the future directions of the project's development.  What
features of the application do you find most useful?  Where do you see
that the application needs improvement?  Are there any additional
features that you would like to see implemented?  We would highly
value any other input as well.

To get started with the project, please visit our wiki page at the
following address:

       http://code.google.com/p/cc-dam/wiki/Howto_Run

This will guide you through the process of checking out the source
code and running it in your environment.

Because this project is built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform
(RCP), it is runnable on any platform which supports Eclipse,
including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD.  It uses the Apache
Derby database to facilitate storage, which makes the project ideal in
large environments where the quantity of metadata may be high.  The
project is also meant to be extensible wherever possible, allowing
users to provide their own capabilities for new filetypes or metadata
attributes.

The current version of the program includes support for both Creative
Commons and Dublin Core metadata tags stored within PDFs (in XMP
format), and for some metadata stored as ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags in MP3
files.  Both the types of metadata and file formats supported are
extensible within the system, allowing anybody to easily add their own
relevant metadata or file types to the system.

Thanks for your time.  With your help, we will be able to improve this
application into a product that will be truly useful and full-featured
digital asset management system.

Notes:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_asset_management

-- 
Taylor Venable
taylor AT metasyntax.net
http://www.metasyntax.net/