MDM Vendors Research Consolidation
NE&O and all clients are inundated with metadata from multiple sources. Most often, this data is used to produce, receive and distribute its media—program, scheduling, rights, and technical metadata are encompassed in the data1. This influx of data has caused systemic and operational metadata issues resulting in disparate, siloed systems and manual processes. There is a need for a Master Data Management (MDM) system to better manage data and assets and help grow the businesses into the future.
NE&O is seeking an MDM system that has a common repository, common interface, and common form1. Access to the right content is key in today’s business thus developing a common repository would mitigate reconciliation across groups and metdata air gaps. A data warehouse would break siloed systems and give common access to all available data. Thus, a common interface can be accessed to publish metadata to applications and workflows downstream. Ultimately, the MDM system would provide a holistic view of each media asset through data aggregation.
MarkLogic
MarkLogic is an operational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL database platform trusted by global organizations to integrate their data2. Its data integration approach (Operational Data Hub) eliminates silos, unifies enterprise data, enables content re-use and achieves the data visibility aforementioned3. MarkLogic addresses duplication of data, siloed workflows and data discoverability providing a holistic 360 view of the production content lifecycle. Through this system, stakeholders will have the capability to collaborate on all aspects of the production content lifecycle. The Data Hub leverages the Enterprise capabilities for: search and discovery, quick integration and deployment of content, semantically linking content, instant automatic replication across lines of businesses, high availability and disaster recover, and flexibility and scalability4. MarkLogic empowers organizations to collaborate, personalize content, create data visualization and analytics, and search/research all available content.
MarkLogic is a leading resource in the Media and Entertainment industry with customers such as NBCUniversal, Warner Bros., Sony and BBC. It is helping them modernize their digital asset management to better deliver their products to users and consumers. MarkLogic’s ability to perform ACID transactions ensures data consistency across its entire platform. While security and standardization are some limitations of NoSQL Database Storage Systems, MarkLogic claims to reduce opportunities for exploits by loading data as is and transforming data within the software5.
NE&O Metadata Store Object Repository v9
2 https://www.marklogic.com/company/about/
3 https://www.marklogic.com/solutions/industry/media/
4 https://cdn1.marklogic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Operational-Data-Hub-for-Film-and-Television-Production.pdf
5 https://www.marklogic.com/blog/top-data-security-issues-integrating-data/
SmartLogic
SmartLogic specializes in developing information retrieval, text analytics, and knowledge management solutions for several industries ranging from media and publishing to energy and utilities. SmartLogic’s Semaphore is an enterprise grade semantic platform that allows organizations to leverage a common vocabulary and sophisticated semantic techniques6. It integrates different data types from disparate sources to create data warehouses in order to extract critical facts, entities and relationships to power workflows and advanced analytics.
SmartLogic has worked with Tribune SmartContent to manage and help create a precise metadata tagging system7. Thus, allowing TCA to better cater to their users. In particular, SmartLogic provides Media and Publishing organizations with the tools to manage their content such as its taxonomy and ontology management, auto classification and search applications. Its Enhancement Server provides users with concept mapping, topic maps, links to web pages and applications, related topics, taxonomy navigation, dynamic summaries, and topic path browser8. The Enhancement Server allows users to create a snapshot of their model and makes it available to downstream applications. The Enhancement Server is the currently the most robust product as two-thirds of SmartLogic’s products are related to classification, taxonomy, and ontology. The latter seem to focus on analyzing and contextualizing text-based documents. However, an important thing to note is SmartLogic can be integrated with MarkLogic that enhances the query search across data silos9.
Informatica
Informatica is focused on data integration through business-to-business data exchange, cloud computing integration, master data management and ultra-messaging. Informatica offers a plethora of products for all business analytic needs: master data management, data integration, data security, big data, and several cloud solutions. This portion will focus on the data integration and master data management products currently available.
Informatica’s data integration infrastructure provides a robust, codeless integrated environment where teams can collaborate, transform and integrate data at any scale10. It has the ability to develop a smart data catalog that users can access across departments, systems, locations or platforms through a Google-like search capability10. It’s data integration hub allows user to connect multiple cloud and big data with existing systems providing a more organized and simplified data integration environment. It’s user interface enables less technical users to find data topics as and when they need it. Additionally, the data hub visualizes data relationships and flow, giving users a single view of business-critical data through metadata-driven management. It’s PowerCenter is robust, enhancing 360 view engagement by viewing data from disparate, duplicate and conflicting information. PowerCenter’s role-based tools allows for rapid prototyping, profiling and validation11. Furthermore, as part of the advanced edition, it has its own taxonomy-like tool where users can authorize and manage their controlled vocabulary.
6 https://www.smartlogic.com/what-we-do
7 https://www.smartlogic.com/images/resources/MCT_CS_051.pdf
8 https://www.smartlogic.com/products/semantic-enhancement-server
9 https://www.smartlogic.com/integrations/marklogic
10 https://www.informatica.com/products/data-integration.html#fbid=2g-ab6jzCrX
11 https://www.informatica.com/products/data-integration/powercenter.html#fbid=2g-ab6jzCrX
Informatica’s master data management delivers a single view of data, a 360 view of data relationships, and a complete view of all interactions12. It is able to integrate and transactions and social interactions that have occurred with any data element. Its integration matches and merges data from new types and sources reducing duplication and accounting for reconciliation. This strengthens its intelligent search capability allowing users to rapidly retrieve any master data information13.
Infromatica does cater to the Media and Entertainment industry with customers such as the Chicago Cubs, Telegraph Media Group, and Comcast. It has helped Comcast process its streaming data from customer devices to better understand consumer prefrences14. However, one of its drawbacks may be usability. Its interface requires some technical understand and coding capabilities and may take time for departments to easily adapt.
PoolParty
PoolParty focuses on knowledge management, data analytics and content organization. Its ontology, taxonomy and linked data management tools allows users to build and maintain their knowledge ecosystems. This creates a foundation for better contextualized data through linking of digital assests15.
PoolParty does caters to the Media and Publishing industry, however, it has a stronger focus on publishing—with customers such as Pearson, Oxford University Press and the Australian Broadcasting Company. PoolParty has given customers the ability to personalize their content for users through concept tagging, streamlining its semantic search, building a taxonomy and thesaurus management, and text mining. PoolParty’s modular software gives access to all these tools, but it’s various modules can be integrated with MarkLogic.
12 https://www.informatica.com/products/master-data-management.html#fbid=2g-ab6jzCrX
13 https://www.informatica.com/products/master-data-management/multidomain-mdm.html#fbid=2g-ab6jzCrX
14 https://www.informatica.com/about-us/customers/customer-success-stories/comcast.html#fbid=2g-ab6jzCrX
15 https://www.poolparty.biz/product-overview/
Alation
Tibco