Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Organizing principles for identity systems:
Digital ID World presentation on LDAP in media asset metadata management (20070925)
Chuck Hurst of Scripps Networks presented "Assigning Identities to Enterprise Assets" at the DIDW conference (DIDW2007). As a media company (HGTV, Food Network, etc.), they observed that they were likely to experience an exponential growth of media "object" assets in the next few years, even though they were anticipating only linear growth in the number of TV episodes they manage. (A single episode might incorporate many snippets of different forms of media objects: video clips, music, stills, graphics, etc., and many of these objects are valuable as they can be reused). At the time, they had 2.5 million objects for 50,000 archived episodes.
The approach to manage these objects use the Dublin Core for the basis of their media object metadata model, and they store the index in an LDAP directory service. They chose LDAP over a relational database approach due to the directory server's fast search, built-in replication, and other reasons. In their pilot scale testing of 9 physical server systems running eDirectory 8.8 storing 100 million objects, they saw they could achieve a sustained rate of 9000 reads/sec, or 33 modifies/sec. Their custom directory-enabled management application, the Scripps Asset Registry (SAR), is deployed with the spring framework in a servlet container, and they tested their application could perform 3000 reads/sec.
Their production deployment has 160,000 broadcast assets as of March 2007, and are in the process of merging 20,000 non-linear assets in October 2007. Their SAR deployment is integrated in their enterprise search infrastructure, and they are considering integrating with the nonlinear editing software tools in the future.
An advantage of this system is that a particular media asset might have multiple identifiers assigned to it. For example, external content providers might have assigned their own identifiers to media objects they license to Scripps Networks.