The mantra entering the new millenium was “Content is King” and that everyone is a content producer. That concept lost some of its luster with the burst of the dot.com bubble, but has jumped back into the spotlight and been proven that content is still King. The penetration of broadband connectivity into the home has enabled access to rich media content of all kinds. It’s not just content coming to the consumer, but also the consumer uploading and sharing their own content in the form of photos, videos, music, blogs, etc.
The Web has delivered ubiquitous access to all of this content whether from the office, the home or the road. Content can be considered the dial tone of the Web. That’s how folks have come to see it. Seeing HTML pages on the Web is how people know it’s working, and those pages themselves are content. The associated images, Flash animation and text are just part of the multi-media content experience we’ve all come to know and love about the Web. The majority of the content is unstructured data or file-based data with greater amounts of it being available for consumption. It’s not just on the Internet, but includes intranets as well that leverage Web-based technology for accessing, storing and sharing content, file-based data.
The challenge with content is that defining it has proven a challenge for the most part. However, one definition I ran across during my time in the media & entertainment space delivering video content management software has proven useful.
Content = Metadata + Essence
Essence can be thought of as file data, such as a video, photo or document, and the metadata is descriptive information about the essence like producer, subject, file name, aspect ratio, date created, DRM, etc. It was recognized that the metadata was often as important as the essence, if not moreso. The reason being that the essence was useless if it could not be found and retrieved. Metadata serves as searchable information allowing files to be located and enabling greater capability for intelligent management.
In this content driven world has come the need for a technology designed to handle file-based data and a rich set of metadata. The file system is proving too limited in its capabilities and object-based storage has entered as an ideal solution to the growing challenge of content storage at massive scale. The relationship of content to objects is simple:
Object = Metadata + File data
Therefore, content and objects can be used interchangeaby and illustrates one of the characteristics that makes object-based storage ideal for the Web and unstructured data in general. Stay tuned. There’s lots more coming on metadata, objects and storage…
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