More success through multilingual metadata

Why do companies and organizations organize their media content with the help of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution? Media should be centrally organized in the DAM in order to use them efficiently. Employees, service providers and other software tools such as web content management or shop systems must be able to access them in a targeted manner. No matter if human or machine, files can only be found if they have been described with helpful metadata. The maintenance of this data is already complex as such and always involves a certain amount of effort. In addition, all relevant information must be translated for internationally active organizations. If this does not happen, it often costs money.

Depending on the country in which the media content is created and imported, the starting point of the metadata is in a different language. If there is no one to translate the data into all relevant languages, the files are hardly usable for colleagues from other countries.

When a shop system or CMS accesses the media of a DAM, defined metadata is often used to optimize images for web searches and to integrate them into URLs, for example. In the case of international companies, however, the search usually takes place in the national language of the customer. For optimal results across national borders, the information must therefore be available in translated form.

Not only the translation of pure text information is a challenge, but also the adaptation of number formats. This starts with different date spellings and goes through different thousand and decimal separators to sales price conversions with different currency symbols or standardized size equivalents in the fashion industry. All of this information is stored somewhere as a metadata for a product and must be made available in a country-specific, correct and therefore comprehensible manner. If a customer does not find his way around or receives incorrect, incomplete or misleading information, he will not buy or, in case of doubt, return the product.

Many of our customers have introduced a fixed vocabulary for metadata. We work with so-called Topic Trees. In these, worlds of terms are organized in a tree structure. The advantage is that each piece of information only has to be translated once. Namely when it is created for the topic tree. Afterwards, the responsible employees can define the information for the respective file with a click. The Topic Tree is displayed in a selectable language. The same then applies to the person searching. In this way, centrally controlled translations are created for important terminology relating to media files. Every user and every system can retrieve them in defined languages.

A thesaurus describes a controlled vocabulary and the relationship between its components. Such thesauri can be integrated into a DAM system and support users in the indexing of new assets. Correspondences from other languages or synonyms within a language can also be integrated into the indexing on the basis of rules.

A particularly nice solution is to use already existing data from third-party systems, which are integrated via interfaces. In the ideal case this is a bidirectional connection. This means that the system in which, for example, the article data is maintained knows the corresponding media content from the DAM, while the DAM can assign the information provided to the content. If necessary, both systems can retrieve and use the data from the other. This applies both to users of one of the two systems and to technically controlled access by content management or shop systems. We are familiar with such connections, for example, to PIM systems or to providers such as 1WorldSync, who offer article master data from various sources for international use.

Anyone who uses the media assets from their DAM system internationally cannot avoid having meta information available and maintained in all relevant languages. Organisations reduce their economic success if they do not do this. The effort for this can be managed with relatively simple means. But above all it is worth the effort.

If you would like to find out how you can implement these strategies, our experts will be happy to help you. Ask your questions by mail to info@pixelboxx.com or by phone 0231/5 34 63-0.