You can’t use assets if you can’t find them. But how should assets be labeled and described so you can find them? This depends on the specific use cases that an asset management system needs to support. Here is a simple example of a use case:

Semantic interoperability enables you to find all the instances of a named entity or group of entities such as named people regardless of the way you look for them. This means that you need to identify and group variations in the way that an entity is named or labeled. Technically this is called a synonym ring. Here’s a simple example of a synonym ring:

There are several ways that you can ensure that assets related to “Mitt Romney” will be found regardless of the way the search for them is stated. One way is always to provide a label for the person’s name whenever you have an asset that is related to them. It’s not necessary that you always provide the same label for that person, as long as you have a synonym ring which includes all the variations or aliases by which this person is known.

A better way is to assign a URI (universal resource identifier) to identify the specific person. A URI is a unique and persistent identifier such as a persistent URL. It’s even better if you use a public resource that has already identified named entities and provided URIs such as the New York Times or the Library of Congress, and link to the URI which they use to uniquely identify the named person. The association of a name with a URI can be represented in what is called a triple. Triples are subject-predicate statements. Here are some simple examples of triples that identify the person “Mitt Romney”:

Using public URIs allows you to find related assets that have used the same URI. You can test this by clicking on the URIs in the previous table, or paste them in your web browser. In a nutshell, finding related information by using URIs to identify named entities is what linked data is all about.

Going to Createasphere’s Digital Asset Management Conference in LA? Sign up for the Metadata Interoperability Add-On Seminar, taught by Joseph A. Busch, to learn more about building vocabularies for named entities such as organizations, locations, and events as well as asset types, roles, activities, characteristics and concepts; how to choose what vocabularies are needed; and how to extract values from content.