One of the delights of my job is meeting people and discovering nuggets, as I call them, of insight that help build ideas and solve problems. I find the more random they are, the better.
Anya Hindmarch, the designer, has a family saying “Things come of things” – so never say no to a meeting which might seem a bit leftfield.
One such meeting happened last week when I met the wonderful people from Digital Catapult – Matt Ward (@mwcatapult) and David Ponsford (@digicatapult). Catapult’s ambition is to take the UK's best digital ideas to market, so creating new products, services, jobs and value.
Underpinned by a tri-partite funding agreement, involving business, grants and public funding, the team focus on data and metadata; the data value chain. As off-putting as the d word is, frequently misused and abused, data has and always will be the future. In 2003 my then Managing Director said, “In God We Trust, everyone else - bring data”, and it has stuck with me ever since. Data are the lifeblood of effective business across every sector and effective management is something which can strike terror into the most hardy of individuals.
12.30pm, Mr Ponsford and Mr Ward arrive at our Baker Street offices, and after a cup of tea, they embark on their story. Five minutes in and I get excited when I hear the word ‘frictionless’. It’s such an elegant word, and as an engineer, it evokes images of well-oiled, polished, reciprocating behemoths, gliding backwards and forwards in some large machine hall.
Digital Catapult’s nugget is a partnership between themselves and The Copyright Hub to create a frictionless process supporting rights management; that bane of production. The Copyright Hub is an open source industry forum allowing the easy exchange of content whilst linking the end-user to the underlying owner of the content rights, all of this, friction-free.
The concept is agnostic in terms of language and licensing regime and permits the identification of content wherever it’s found through embedded identifiers. The Digital Catapult team are still in development phase but moving quickly to live release of use cases and market-facing functionality.
The second half of this year will see the first live use case focused on images, with music following later in the year. In time, they expect to establish a repository of rights information using a common rights format which is publicly available for query.
I was struck by the concept, knowing how convoluted and distended the rights management value chain can be. This can only be good for the industry, which brings me back to the title.
Bringing, carrying and managing data always presents challenges. As a basic rule, it should never be replicated to avoid the risk of someone changing one version of it, so keep it in its original form. Decide what you want to do with your data – maintain, retire or invest in it. And, finally, get it right and keep it right. Of course, the only exception to the first rule is making sure it’s backed up. Now given the discipline required in all of this, having third parties manage the process gives busy people one less thing to worry about and allows economies of scale to be leveraged.
As for the fleeting reference to God, upon reflection data really are too important to be left in the lap of a deity, (or non-deity for the secularists). Digital Catapult and The Copyright Hub are onto a good thing. Remember, things come of things.
Haydn Jones is Account Managing Director at Fujitsu UK&I. Find out more about Fujitsu here.
