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Extensible Metadata Platform Overview

Overview: Metadata and XMP

Metadata is any data that helps to describe the content or characteristics of a file. You’re probably already accustomed to viewing and perhaps adding some basic metadata through the File Info or Document Properties box found in many software applications and some operating systems. You may also use an asset- or content-management system that captures some file properties and displays them for you.

With an XMP-enabled application, information about a project can be captured during the content-creation process and embedded within the file and into a content-management system. Meaningful descriptions and titles, searchable keywords, and up-to-date author and copyright information can be captured in a format that is easily understood by you as well as by software applications, hardware devices, and even file formats.

Best of all, as other workgroup members modify files and assets, XMP-encoded metadata can be edited and updated in real time during the normal course of the workflow.

Open standards

By providing a standard, W3C-compliant way of tagging files with metadata across products from Adobe and other vendors, XMP is a powerful solution enabler. As an open-source technology, it is freely available to developers, which means that the user community benefits from the innovations contributed by developers worldwide. Furthermore, XMP is extensible, meaning that it can accommodate existing metadata schemas; therefore, systems don’t need to be rebuilt from scratch. A growing number of third-party applications already support XMP.

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