Kas Thomas recently commented on Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) which he thinks is on its way becoming an ISO standard. Thomas writes, “for at least three years I’ve been saying that it would be in Adobe’s best interest to hand oversight over this ostensibly open standard to a bonafide Standards Body (rather than let adoption languish as people continue to associate XMP with ‘Adobe-proprietary’). Happily, Adobe is in fact now doing the right thing: XMP is in the process of becoming ISO-16684-1, via an effort led by my colleague Frank Biederich. This effort couldn’t have come at a better time. The content world is in desperate need of an industry-standard way to represent rich-content metadata, and I strongly believe XMP is the right technology at the right time.”

Thomas goes on, “One can quibble over whether embedding XMP in a host file is the correct thing to do (as opposed to placing it in the file’s resource fork, or simply creating XMP as a separate sidecar file and managing it separately). There are good arguments pro and con. But packaging issues aside, there’s not much question, in my mind, that nearly every form of content benefits from having easily-parsed metadata associated with it. This is particularly true of enterprise content (content that’s managed in some kind of access-controlled repository). The availability of metadata makes a given content bit easier to repurpose, easier to track, easier to search — easier to work with all the way around.”

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Image: Courtesy XMP