Assets
Asset are a major part of what users use with iconik. Related to assets are metadata and formats. Typically an asset is an abstraction of what users will understand as a file, with extra information. In iconik an Asset can be made up of multiple files which make up a format. And there can be multiple formats associated to an Asset.
To the user this abstraction can be seen through the formats.
Owners
The user that creates an asset in iconik automatically gets full rights to the entity that they created. Administrators have access over and above the usual ACLs - so that they have access to everything in the system.
Approval
Assets can have approval status applied to them, such as requested, approved & rejected.
Metadata
Metadata fields can and usually are associated with an Asset. Over and above that there is certain metadata that is part of the asset itself:
- Title.
- ID (UUID - which is given when the asset record is created).
- External ID.
- Date Created.
- Relations.
- Status.
For everything else Metadata fields allow you to store metadata against an asset, by defining the field that you wish to use and then a value of that field entity gets associated to the asset. This shows up in the Web Interface in Metadata Views which can hold all or a subset of the metadata field information.
Comments and Time-Based Metadata
Both Comments and Time-Based Metadata are a type of Segment that can be associated to an Asset. There is a one-to-one relationship of all Segment Types to an Asset.
Asset History
A history of what users have been doing with Assets is kept as an Asset History. It will show information who performed the operation, when the operation was completed and a description of the operation.
Relationships
Collections
Assets can belong to none, one or more Collections.
Files and Formats
Typically an asset has one or more files associated to it. This file is a member of a file set and associated to a format.
With Video & Audio assets, you can often have more than one file, here are some examples:
- Separate video and audio tracks that make up a video.
- Multi-Camera video.
- Separate stereoscopic video.
- Video that also has external caption files.
- Image Sequences.
Each of those would make up one format. Then you could have transcoded the images sequence example into a h.264 mp4 video that plays back in a web-browser, that would be another format - but it would contain the same meaning, just a different representation.
Sharing
Assets can be shared with other users. There are two types of share:
- Internal, changing the ACL of an asset to allow another user to view the asset.
- External, adding a timed out ability for a external user to access the asset.
Indexing
Assets are indexed into the search engine with their metadata and approval status. This is done every time the asset is updated.
Version
Assets are versioned. Each asset version will contain it's own unique reference to:
- Formats, Filesets and Files.
- Proxies
- Approval
- Metadata
- Comments and Time-Based Metadata
- Relationships
- Sharing