In just a few weeks Joseph Busch will be at Createasphere’s Digital Asset Management Conference. Joseph is a thought leader in the space and one of the most sought after experts. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing him virtually to give us a sneak peak at what we can expect at his add-on seminar on Metadata & Taxonomy and the panel discussion on Big Data he is contributing to.
1. How did you get started in working with taxonomies and metadata?
I am a librarian by training, but have worked with digital text and images from the beginning of my career in 1977 as a law librarian in NY. During 10 years working with the Getty Trust’s art history vocabulary and database projects I was lucky to be associated with early prototypes of the semantic web including the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN). I was recruited to be a VP at a semantic web start-up company (Metacode Technologies) during the dot com era, and then worked at a leading CMS vendor (Interwoven) after they acquired the start-up. Since then people have been hiring me to give them advice on how to solve business problems related to taxonomies and metadata.
2. How do you utilize DAM on a day-to-day basis?
Daily I’m working with up to five different project teams developing schemes and processes to tag and manage assets to support B2B (Business to Business), B2C (Business to Consumer) and G2C (Government to Citizen) web presences. We’re defining the buckets or types of tags—metadata, and specifying the names or values to be used to populate them—taxonomies. All this work enables DAMs (and other information management systems) to function effectively as part of organizations’ information ecosystems.
3. What’s the most valuable aspect of DAM as it relates to your work?
A well-implemented DAM allows you to find and use and re-use your content assets. When you search you can rely on the results being correct and complete. End users can find the assets they need quickly and be confident about how they can be used. You can reliably determine the cost and value of assets throughout their lifecycle. Sounds like heaven.
4. You’re presenting a seminar on “Metadata & Taxonomy” at the Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference. What’s it all about?
The seminar will be an overview of metadata and taxonomy—how this stuff works and what business problems are solved. We’ll talk about the metadata standards, how to generate cheap and easy metadata, and cool things you can do with that metadata. Finally we’ll look at some examples of metadata and taxonomy for different types of assets.
5. What do you hope attendees will gain from attending your seminar?
Attendees will be able to explain to their boss how metadata and taxonomy will help to realize the value of digital assets through asset monetization and production cost savings.
6. You are also speaking on Big Data. Why is big data important to the role of DAM and to taxonomies?
The big secret about big data is big metadata—how to identify and use the patterns that exist in everything to tell you useful things about anything. Analytics is the key to identifying patterns. Identifying patterns helps manage risks. Identifying patterns also can provide insights into the unknown relationships between things that were previously unnoticed. But big data like other digital assets requires an information management strategy to be useful, sustainable and productive.
Join Joseph and many other experts at Createasphere's upcoming DAM event at the Beverly Hills Hilton Feb. 27th & 28th.
Joseph Busch, Taxonomy Strategies: The Business of Organized Information