DDEX White Paper:
Standardisation for an Automated Transaction Processing Environment in the Digital Media Supply Chain
Document Board-401 as of 13th January 2010
Executive Summary
Digital Data Exchange LLC ("DDEX") is publishing this White Paper to set out a view of the standardisation required in the digital media supply chain to achieve the following goal:
Enabling highly standardised and automated transaction processing of metadata and its associated content to provide, at a cost effective price, the highest possible levels of operational efficiency amongst participants in the digital media supply chain.
The white paper sets out the following six components that require standardisation if this goal is to be achieved:
- Message creation and ingestion;
- Message exchange;
- Exchange of resource files;
- Choreographies for message and resource exchange;
- Unique identification of all relevant entities: and
- Accessible databases of unique identifiers and associated minimum metadata for all relevant entities.
Standardising these components and deploying them in a highly automated technical environment will provide significantly improved efficiency in operational transaction processing and radically reduce costs in the digital media supply chain. This will provide a flexible and extensible infrastructure, which will be able to react quickly to consumer demand, generating higher revenues and expanding the market for digital media content.
DDEX makes no assumption as to the nature of the stakeholder groups that might undertake the actual standardisation required. Rather, the White Paper is intended as a starting point for a dialogue across the whole digital media supply chain that might eventually lead to the achievement of that goal.
What is certain is that no single stakeholder group within the digital media supply chain is in a position to map the building blocks or carry out the requisite standardisation on their own. In a highly connected world, single stakeholder groups can no longer specify standards to meet their own requirements but must embrace the requirements of their immediate business partners and, indeed, businesses two or three removed from them. Without this approach the likelihood of achieving high levels of automation based on standards in the connected and "multi"-media world, will be significantly reduced. The goal can only be achieved through extensive co-operation, if nothing else to avoid duplication or gaps appearing in the standardisation map and more particularly to avoid the development of competing or incompatible standards in the transaction-processing environment.
DDEX therefore welcomes any input that individual
companies, representative trade associations or other
standards organisations may have to progress this
dialogue. This can take the form simply of comments
logged through the
or more formal dialogue through arranged
meetings, whether physical or virtual. DDEX hopes that
through this dialogue some clear pathways for
collaboration and co-operation can be identified which
will eventually result in a highly automated
transaction-processing environment throughout the
digital media supply chain.
