We’ve received a lot of good questions during the webinar and wanted to post them for everyone as another resource for when you develop out your controlled vocabularies.  If  your question went unanswered, scroll down to find your question and you’ll have your answer.  (The italicized answers are the ones we could not address during the webinar or additions we made to an original answer.)

Q: I didn’t catch what Leigh Ann said when she said some products call controlled vocabularies another name.

A: Keyword Catalog or Keyword List are other commonly used terms

Q: Should I pick a type to use before I start making my list?

A: Well, before you start, you need to determine if your current DAM supports using a controlled vocabulary and what types they support.  You don’t have to select a type. I think the examples shown demonstrate that there is some overlap especially with taxonomy and faceted. So you may actually end up using more than one type. Thinking about this first is definitely a good idea. It will help you create a consistent structure that people can understand. But, you don’t need to commit first to a type. And really, once you start your keywording, you will see a pattern naturally start to develop.

Q: Does Bridge support taxonomy lists?

A: Yes, Bridge supports a taxonomy, or nested keywords.

Q: Didn’t you publish free resources/sites for keywords earlier on, in last webinar?

A: In this webinar (Controlled Vocabulary), we presented the following 3 great resources:

www.controlledvocabulary.com

www.taxonomywarehouse.com

www.keyword-catalog.com

Previously, we published our top 5 favorite metadata resources here: http://www.webdamsolutions.com/digital-asset-management/metadata-resource/

Q:  What is the difference between a taxonomy and a facted vocabulary?

A: The difference is that in a taxonomy, I can search by the parent of the child so in the case I brought up about staples, I can search by chairs or executive chairs and get the same results.  Now, a faceted vocabulary works different in the way that it is not a parent child relationship. So, with the yelp example, I searched by restaurants, they come up and then I can group my results by different characteristics such as price range or neighborhood. The difference is that I would not search by neighborhoods alone and get restaurants, nor would I search by price range and get restaurants. There is no parent child relationship. The restaurants don’t belong to a parent such as neighborhood. If it were a taxonomy, the parent may be restaurants and the child might be different types of food.

Q: What types of digital assets can you keyword?

A: Most often photos and videos but applies to any type of digital asset.

Q: In WebDAM, when you upload a list of keywords to build a controlled vocabulary, when you upload another list does it overwrite the initial list or add to it?

A: You can choose replace or append when you upload.

Q: How many words should be on my controlled vocabulary list?

A: It will vary by your industry and your needs. The ski image for instance had 50 words or so attached to it. It is subjective. But, if you’re maintaining a database with a narrow scope, you may only need 50 words on your list all together. On the flip if you in a scientific industry, while your audience may be very specific or even small, your vocabulary list may be enormous because a specific and known naming convention already exists.

Q: Where is the Controlled Vocabulary tool within WebDAM?

A: It can be enabled and uploaded from the Preference page.
We also have a great Feature in Focus article about controlled vocabulary in DAM-it! The Blog and you can find it here and see a step by step guide for implementation. http://www.webdamsolutions.com/digital-asset-management/controlled-vocabulary/

Q: Could you give an example of the Types of keywords used on a graphic? Such as a website banner, a quote graphic, or any other website graphic

A: Example – a quote graphic – client who quoted it, product name it is in reference to, or any important/key terms from the quote itself.

Q: What is the price rang of lists for purchase?

A: This varies quite a bit. I have seen lists that cost 75 dollars and others that are thousands.

Q: [When you do a keyword search] does happy also find happiness?

A: Not in most search engines.  Therefore, either keywording with both terms or standardizing your forms of words (preferred) is important.

Q: What’s the best way to keyword a person’s name?  John Doe or John, Doe?  Are caps needed?

A: John Doe (no comma).  Searches are case INSENSITIVE so using upper case won’t change your search results.  However, it does make it easier to read so we recommend using upper case for proper nouns only.
Q: So if a searcher types just John or just Doe, it will return assets with that particular name?
A: Yes it will – depends on the tool but in WebDAM and many others it will work that way.

Q: Who should be involved in creating the list?

A: The people involved need to understand the business goals and the data. In the case of my personal example of keywording the garden images. The business goals were not understood nor was the data. Which is why, the keywords were all over the map and definitely not a controlled vocabulary. But, it would have been easy to create a controlled vocabulary had the right people been involved. One person who understood the data is the horticulturist. She would have been a great person to involve. In your own businesses, product experts would be good. Also, maybe a set of people who will be accessing the data. Now, you don’t necessarily need to involve them in the entire process, but maybe just send a draft of the list to them and ask them what these terms mean to them.

Q: how do you get the sales and marketing to participate in helping the DAM manager get all the info to apply keywords? Ex.: if it’s a sales brochure and others call it sales sheet – how do you get others to tell the DAM what these other names outside sales or education call it?

A: This is where your Controlled Vocabulary is key.  If Sales Sheet isn’t in the keyword list, then the keyworder will select Sales Brochure.  Likewise, it is important to involve a few stakeholders across the business in the development of the vocabulary.

Q: Can I download the slides?

A: They will be made available after the presentation.
Yes, our Webinar Page, http://webdamsolutions.com/summer_webinar_series.php has links to download everything webinar related.  You can now download the slides, webinar materials (like the Controlled Vocabulary Worksheet), and webinar recordings.

All these questions were a great, thanks again for taking part in our webinar!  If you just watched the recording and didn’t get a chance to ask any live questions or if any other questions come up, about controlled vocabulary or even just DAM related, feel free to comment here or send us an email at info@webdamsolutions.com.

In this webinar we will explore the topic of controlled vocabulary and how it applies to selecting, implementing, and managing a digital asset management system.  Attendees will gain the insight they need to develop a keyword library for use within their digital workflows and metadata efforts. Join WebDAM’s customer success manager, Leigh Ann as she hosts this valuable webinar that will help you use controlled vocabulary to enhance the search-abilty and usability of a digital asset management system.

What: “Controlled Vocabulary: Implementing a library of keywords to improve consistency and search-ability.”

When: Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 10am PT

Want to get a little more familiar with controlled vocabulary before the webinar?
Take a look at our  blog post “Feature in Focus: Controlled Vocabulary” where Leigh Ann briefly highlights this WebDAM feature… http://www.webdamsolutions.com/digital-asset-management/controlled-vocabulary/

Other Upcoming Webinars:

Building the Framework: Organizing your digital assets for any business

Thursday, September 15 at 10 am (PT)

User Adoption: Engaging your team with a communication plan

Thursday, October 13 at 10 am (PT)

Previous Webinars:

Make sure to take advantage of these great DAM resources!

But the prospect said it best with this analogy…

“You know when you go to a friend’s house, and you need silverware, and have to open every single drawer to find a fork… and your friend is like, ‘Isn’t it obvious which drawer the fork would be in?!’ But, if it were your house, you would put the silverware in a completely difference place, so no it is not obvious! That’s what browsing a folder structure setup by our US headquarters is like for our partners in Asia.”

Awesome.

Leigh Ann will start off the series with “Metadata 101: Building a Solid Foundation” on Thursday, July 14 at 10am PT featuring our very own industry expert, Jody Vandergriff.  All the webinars in this series are perfect for users across all levels of experience.  To reserve your spot today, or to get a closer look at this webinar, register for free here.

To check out the whole series and uncover the topics that will be presented in the upcoming webinars, visit the Summer Webinar Series Schedule.  Space is limited so save the dates and make sure to reserve your seat as soon as the registration pages become available.

Fresh off the press, read this press release that reveals more information about the series at: http://webdamsolutions.com/press_summer_webinar_series.php

Join us in our Summer Webinar Series and have fun learning about Digital Asset Management!

Picture this: your firm’s marketing department sends over a request for some stock images for use in an online campaign. With multiple demands coming your way, you quickly dig around in your digital archives, looking for the right image but failing to check the fine print — in this case, the copyright and license metadata for each image. Finally, the perfect image comes across your screen, and you fire it off to the marketing department, confident that it’ll make a sparkling new web advertisement.

Some months later, you get a notice saying that the image in use has violated the terms of the license.  Now, the legal department has to get involved.

It’s the type of tale that would give any employee — or Chief Legal Counsel — a nightmare. And for businesses that are overwhelmed and under-resourced, it can generate all types of panic and paranoia. Unfortunately, this story is a real-world occurrence. For example, Getty often licenses its images for one-year usage (rights-managed usage). However, the actual JPG files are downloaded and stored on a hard drive, often without a digital asset management tool to keep track of license metadata. Instead, they’re put into a stock folder for future use. And large companies like Getty have the means to track usage, often outsourcing to firms that search for digital fingerprints across the web to make sure that images are properly used, both visually and legally.

In some cases, the violator will get a cease-and-desist notice. For that situation, the cost comes with the overhead of recalling a marketing campaign. A small marketing campaign may simply have to swap out an image on a website, but if the campaign has received wide distribution across a number of media streams, then the issue becomes much bigger. Not only do things have to be recalled and undone, marketing departments will have to double their efforts in creating a replacement campaign.

That’s just one scenario, but this can play out in many different ways. Getty has had some of their cases go public, and the process involved a lawsuit before settling out of court. In one such case, the settlement was the equivalent of about $4,000 — but there were plenty of other costs attached to that.

Legal fees add up fast; in that particular case, the final legal bill was about $40,000 — a stake in the heart for a small company. At the same time, news of this leaked and was picked up by search engines. As celebrities and athletes have shown us, nothing is safe in the age of the internet, and companies noted for a Getty Image usage violation can have this stigma attached to their name thanks to the way Google indexes news and search results. For the small company in question, their public image took a beating over a tiny mistake, and the collateral damage was untold amounts of dollars in lost business.

The math is simple — between the settlement and legal fees, that’s $44,000 simply removed from the company’s resources. The moral of the story is that digital asset rights management is absolutely critical in today’s business world. It doesn’t matter if an honest mistake was innocently made, and sure, there’s a chance that rights violations may never get caught. But the bottom line is that it’s a high-wire act for any organization to try, especially if it impacts long-term business potential.

The solution, then, is smart digital asset management. We’ve long passed the days when you can right-click a file and save it to the desktop to be used later. Today, image rights are imprinted on the file’s metadata, making it simple to track with the appropriate tools. An effective digital asset management application can read and track image rights usage — and limit file usage once those rights have expired. It’s an automatic safeguard against the legal pitfalls of digital images and media.

If you’ve been holding off on investing in a digital asset management application because storing files on a hard drive seems easy enough, then you’re only seeing part of the picture. One simple click can turn into tens of thousands of dollars in lost capital. Now weigh that against the cost of an effective digital asset management system that can track rights usage. The smarter, safer investment is obvious, and you also receive the functional benefits of digital asset management. In the information age, this safety net isn’t just a luxury — it’s becoming a necessity.

US Copyright Office Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/

Straight from the US Copyright Office you can get many of your copyright questions answered.  The most frequently asked questions have been listed and organized into different categories for easier navigation and you can get all your answers with just one click.

ASMP How to Register for Copyright Protection
http://asmp.org/tutorials/best-practices.html

The American Society of Media Photographers does a really good job outlining how to register for copyright protection specifically for digital images.  “Best Practices for Registering” goes through each step of what needs to be done before publication in order to fully utilize copyright laws.

SAA Photo Metadata Project
http://www.photometadata.org/

In order to protect copyrights photo metadata is very important to maintain and understand.  The Stock Artists Alliance in partnership with the Library of Congress created a site to promote the use of standardized photo metadata.  Become “meta-smart” and make your copyrights stick. (Also featured in Top 5 Metadata Resources where you can get more metadata information.)

Plagiarism Today
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/

Anything that can be copyrighted can also be plagiarized and in case you come across an instance where you see your work being misused, Plagiarism Today covers what you should do.  This site does a great job providing information about finding instances of plagiarism and how to report it, all with the goal of stopping internet plagiarism.

Tineye
http://www.tineye.com/

This free tool is a reverse search engine that allows you to submit an image and get results that show where copies can be found, how they are being used, copies that have been modified, and more.  Upload a picture to find its original source, to see if you can use it, or if other people are using your images without your permission

Being organized is the key to keeping track of all the copyrights and licensing terms attached to acquired images, files, or documents.  A digital asset management solution makes metadata easily accessible for referencing usage rights.  Contact us with copyright questions and how a DAM solution can help your business stay above the law while keeping your assets safe.

WebDAM supports the use of a controlled vocabulary to facilitate keywording in a consistent manner. For many organizations, the controlled vocabulary is often custom created to include words such as product names or industry-specific terms. For others, such as stock agencies, it makes sense to purchase a standard controlled vocabulary which includes broader terms such as man, woman, office, child. Whatever the source, WebDAM fully supports it in several ways:

For the Administrator: Through the web-based administrator tools, a controlled vocabulary can be imported, managed, and enabled to provide an easy mechanism for selecting terms to keyword your assets. This time-saving feature ensures consistency and uniformity in keywording across your database.

For the User: WebDAM also integrates the controlled vocabulary within the search capabilities so users have the added benefit of selecting terms rather than typing. This approach eliminates user frustration from searching terms that do not exist in the database. Users find what they need faster and easier.

Creating a controlled vocabulary for use in WebDAM takes just a matter of minutes once you have determined which terms you would like to include. A simple text file, one word per line, is all you need to get started!

Controlled Vocabulary
http://controlledvocabulary.com/

The Controlled Vocabulary website, founded by David Riecks, contains a wealth of information on building vocabulary lists and keyword hierarchies for describing images in databases.  Available for purchase on the Controlled Vocabulary website is The Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog which provides creatives with a thorough list of terms (over 11,000 to date) across a broad range of themes that can be utilized to annotate images accurately and consistently.

International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
http://iptc.org/

IPTC is a consortium of news agencies, publishers and industry vendors that develop and maintain the popular IPTC photo metadata standard which defines information such as copyright, location, and keywords. The IPTC website is a technical resource containing information about the latest IPTC standards as well the Photo Metadata Roadmap, describing current and future plans for photo metadata standards.

dpBestflow
http://dpbestflow.org/

An initiative of the American Society of Media Photographers, dpBestflow provides information on different kinds of metadata as well as how to handle your metadata issues. A few examples of the topics covered on the dpBestlow website include: metadata templates, extensible metadata platform (XMP), global positioning system data (GPS), ratings, and metadata handling among many others. This website serves as a great educational tool for anyone looking to get more insight into metadata.

The Photo Metadata Project
http://www.photometadata.org/

Fueled by their commitment to promote an industry wide use of standardized metadata in all digital files, the Stock Artists Alliance in partnership with the Library of Congress created the Photo Metadata project. By reporting on metadata issues and creating online resources and educational tools, the Photo Metadata Project strives to exemplify the ease and benefits of embedding metadata in digital photos.

Abobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)
http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/

Adobe XMP is another popular and widely adopted embedded metadata offering support across a number of file formats including tiff, eps and jpg. Adobe’s XMP website includes technical information on the XMP standard as well as a list of vendors that support XMP metadata.

Photo metadata can be a bit convoluted and overwhelming at first glance, especially since different standards exist for storing it. Things don’t get easier when you add in different applications that read, write, and handle metadata in various ways. Still, a consistent element exists with all photo metadata, and these simple concepts can help anyone get more out of their photos.

What is metadata?
A simple and very common definition of metadata is data about data. However, I much prefer the definition from Everything is Miscellaneous: Metadata is what you know and data is what you’re looking for.

What is photo metadata?
Photo metadata is a specific type of metadata that refers to the attributes of a digital photo. It is different from other types of metadata due to its embedded nature – photo metadata is typically embedded within the image header for additional functionality and usefulness. This provides flexibility, allowing the metadata details to travel with the photo independent of the application or environment. In other words, photo metadata is interoperable.

Let’s look at an example of photo metadata in action. If a photographer uses Adobe Lightroom for post-processing his images, he can add key metadata details such as location, copyright, and keywords using Lightroom’s captioning tools. He can then send the image to a client that uses Apple Aperture. The client can open the image in Aperture, and even though the application is different, the metadata is still accessible.

Without photo metadata standards, this simply wouldn’t be possible – each application would read and write in application-specific fields, meaning that information couldn’t be exchanged between Lightroom and Apple Aperture. It’s easy to imagine how this would create headaches for everyone involved.

What are photo metadata standards?
Photo metadata standards describe consistent available metadata fields so information can cross platforms. The standards provide instructions for application developers on how to read and write information to and from the image. The most common and widely adopted metadata standards are EXIF, IPTC, and XMP.

Why are there several different standards?
In any industry, communication is easier when there is a single standard to use. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened here, and it’s really just because that’s the way things evolved. The good news for consumers is that only application developers really have to deal with the different standards. As a user, the standards provide different types of information and benefits and most software applications handle these standards fairly seamlessly, providing the benefits of each sans the confusion. Let’s take a closer look at each of these standards:

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format): EXIF is metadata embedded in an image by a digital camera when the image is first captured. EXIF data includes information such as camera manufacturer, model, focal length, color space, date, and time. Most EXIF fields are write-protected and can’t be edited by software applications; this is because any editing or updating of these fields would impact the integrity of the original photo capture information. EXIF metadata is supported in JPEG and TIFF files.

IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council): IPTC is the standard that defines information such as copyright, location, and keywords. Originally developed for news agencies in the 1990s, IPTC allows different organizations (such as news agencies) to exchange photo information by adding the metadata using photo management and capturing tools. IPTC metadata is supported in JPEG and TIFF files and has seen wide adoption by third-party software vendors.

XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform): XMP is an XML-based standard that supports a wider range of file formats (including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, PDF, AI, EPS, and DNG files). Developed by Adobe, XMP is generally easier to work with for software applications because of the extensible XML format. While XMP is viewed as a better platform by many in the industry, Adobe understood the need to work with previous standards. Because of this, Adobe integrated IPTC metadata into XMP to prevent older images from being left behind.

Despite the best intentions of Adobe to integrate IPTC into XMP, there’s still a gap in terms of compatibility. Some applications support XMP, some support legacy IPTC, and some support both. To make things more complicated, some applications may offer different levels of support for these standards (e.g. reading from both but only writing to one).

Other applications, WebDAM included, offer an all-encompassing solution by writing to both standards. This helps keep them in sync. For example, if you wanted to put metadata in your photo regarding country of origin, you could save “country=USA.” The application would simultaneously save the metadata to the legacy IPTC “country” field and the XMP “country” field for maximum flexibility regardless of application.

In terms of software, choices exist when it comes to compatibility. The popular Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, etc.) support EXIF, IPTC, and XMP, and even includes different types of functionality for handling images and associated metadata. Outside of Adobe’s products, hundreds of other applications, ranging from editing tools to photo database and digital asset management systems, support at least one of these standards.

Given the huge investment involved with annotating an image archive, your application of choice should include support for these widely adopted standards. The wrong choice could create a ripple effect through your digital media pipeline, forcing you to backtrack and make retroactive updates and corrections. If you’re considering software that uses proprietary standards for handling metadata, it’s best to let it be – those types of applications will only cost you valuable time and money in the end.