Introduction

Digital markup languages have been around since the standard generalised markup language (SGML) was first published in 1986. Although SGML gained acceptance in certain limited circles, it was not until the development of extensible markup language (XML) that markup was enthusiastically taken up by industries from newspaper publishing to multimedia. XML is a subset of SGML. It has now been adopted as a universal data container that is platform agnostic. XML did not start out this way. Its original application was for documents with unstructured content, mainly for publishing and storage of legal and medical documents. The use of the meta-language as a data container emerged later as the killer application for XML.

The latest software applications for handling rich media may seem a long way from the 35 mm movie, but celluloid has lessons for all. One word sums it up standards.The movie industry could never have become so successful if every studio had used a different film gauge.

Today, we still see the enterprise made up of a number of software islands. The accounts department may run a client server system with an Oracle database on a UNIX platform. The marketing department is an Apple Mac house. The rights department may be running SQL Server on Windows 2000. If the applications are linked, the middleware may use CORBA or J2EE.

A digital asset management system has to provide a seamless view of the enterprise; an environment where information and media assets can be created, searched, stored, and traded in...