Consistency of meaning has emerged as a major challenge in a rapidly developing multimedia, multilingual, multi-platform world where metadata standards are proliferating at an unprecedented rate, and automated digital rights management (DRM) systems need to draw information from wider and more diverse sources. As a consequence, organisations have to operate with many different vocabularies. Semantic confusion is becoming very costly, resulting in lost opportunities because existing systems are not adaptable enough. Semantic engineering facilitates frictionless machine-to-machine (M2M) communication by managing the meaning of metadata that uses terms from different database schemes. Rightscom's semantic engineering service Ontologyx offers cutting edge tools and services to support the three core processes of semantic engineering, namely defining the meanings of terms and schemes (such as messages and database schemas); mapping together the meanings of different terms and schemes; and transforming metadata from one term or scheme to another without losing its original meaning. Rightscom has defined and developed metadata schemes for many content industry standards, including the MPEG Rights Data Dictionary, and individual clients such as the International DOI Foundation. |