Director of Integration Services

As Director of Integration Services at DPCI, Ivan manages enterprise digital asset management, web content management, and workflow management implementations on behalf of DPCI's customers. Ivan holds a Masters in Printing Technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the author of "Hand of a Master: Achievements in the Graphic Arts" (RIT Press, 2002).

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November 06, 2008

What's in a Name?

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I don't want to go too broadly in this blog on the history, theory, or meaning of file-naming conventions, but for as long as the computer has been around, filenames have been the quickest and easiest way of identifying a document's contents, or what an image is a picture of.

This may be true, but consider how many times you have seen files like the ones pictured below:

These filenames don't do much to convey what they actually are. Yes we know that the BusinessPlan.doc file probably contains some sort of business plan, and the logo.jpg file is probably a logo for some company, but that's it, nothing else. We'd have to open each of these files to really know what they are.

Naming conventions are supposed to solve this problem. Wether you use your own, or you work for a company or organization, chances are you are using some sort of naming convention to help organize files and folders and to help facilitate searching.

But what happens when naming conventions are too simple or too complex? Because a filename can only contain a limited amount of characters, we have to resort to coding or abbreviating parts of a filename so that we can fit in more information. To people within our company or organization these filenames will make sense, because we are all using the same naming convention, but to anyone external these filenames may make no sense at all.

Is putting a date on a filename redundant, considering that you can almost always display a modification date when browsing files?

Computer operating systems and software have advanced in many ways that make some parts of a filename unnecessary. Consider that recent versions of both Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows have ways to display a preview of a file without even opening it. The latest version Mac OSX (Leopard) has a file view called CoverFlow that will display all of your files in a thumbnail carousel-like view showing images and the first page of a documents, PDFs or spreadsheets. This type of view solves the problem of identification in my first example.

CoverFlow Image

While file browsing has become a much richer experience, sometimes you need information about a file that isn't visible in a preview, or can't fit in a filename; enter XMP. The Xtensible Metadata Platform lets you embed extended information into a file that can be viewed, tracked, and searched.

What type of information might you enter into XMP? Pretty much anything. Keywords, description, digital rights information, copyright, photographer, captions, geographic location, intended usage, client, company etc. XMP metadata can be embedded into pretty much any image file type, and a number of different document types.

Embedding this information into the file has clear benefits, as not only do you have the flexibility to store information without having to resort to abbreviations, but the information will travel with the file wherever it goes. If I'm a photographer or designer and I want my contact information and copyright embedded on all my work before I distribute files, XMP is the way to go. Organizations can use XMP to tag keywords to images and documents, making them much easier to find later.

As XMP has a wide range of use many standards organizations have formed to help define common usage among industries. The PRISM specification defines common metadata standards for publication files. The DISC standard is intended to define a common set of metadata for digital image submissions.

Organizing and searching documents will become much easier with the use of smart naming conventions and XMP metadata. The additional benefit of using XMP metadata is that many Digital Asset Management systems can search through, read and edit it.

At DPCI we have worked with many organizations to help them define metadata and naming convention strategies including implementation of XMP in document and image workflows. Please contact us if you would like us to help you in maximizing the search-ability and repurposing capabilities of your content.

For more information on XMP standards please visit: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/standards.html

For additional information on XMP please visit: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/

Posted at 09:45 pm by Ivan Mironchuk