DAM Terminology

DAM

ØWhen designing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, a key element of success is designing a content architecture that best represents each client’s marketing world and user needs.

ØSitecore Content Hub™ Professional edition / Fixed Content Modelling provides some flexibility in how content can be modeled to reflect varying client contexts and use cases by enabling the creation of custom metadata properties and taxonomies. 

What is a Domain Model?

ØA domain model defines the kinds of things that are part of a system’s domain and how those things get described, structured, and linked. 

ØIn Sitecore Content Hub the domain model is a representation of the types of entities that make up the marketing world of a customer that will be stored in the DAM and how they are related to and inherit information from each other.

Entity

ØAn entity is a real-world thing or concept represented in the DAM. An entity can be a file uploaded

to the DAM (i.e. a digital asset), along with its metadata, or simply a collection of related data.

Ø“Asset” is a type of entity, but other examples of entities include:

● Product

● Brand

● Recipe

● Article

● Store

● Hotel

● User

● etc.

ØAn entity definition defines how an entity is structured via a set of metadata properties.

ØThe definition (or schema) includes both descriptive metadata properties as well as relations between other entities.

ØThe entity definition can also be thought of as a content type definition or an entityspecific metadata schema.

Relation

ØA relation is a link between two entities that allows for displaying the data on detail pages from the parent-child direct relationship.

ØNote that regular relations cannot inherit and cannot cascade data or security via the hierarchical parent-child "family tree" and must be handled via taxonomy relations instead.

ØNon-taxonomic relations are typically used for simple direct parent-child relations between entities and displaying these via direct relations within detail pages.

ØTaxonomy relations should be used for more advanced metadata and security inheritance, to be able to be used for facet searching on search pages and cascading data inheritance via the family tree.

Taxonomy definition

A taxonomy definition is similar to the entity definition in that it defines how an entity is structured via a set of metadata properties but it also allows for it to be searchable as a filter/ facet or in advanced search query options on the different search pages within one or multiple levels within the “family tree” of parent-child relationships.

Taxonomy relation

ØA taxonomy relation is a link between two entities that allows for data inheritance from the parentchild hierarchy.

ØCreating taxonomy relations between entities makes each of the entities more defined and richer without duplicating data.

ØThis is because relations between entities allow for inheritance of data from the parent entity to the child entity by either making them searchable or displaying them inside detail pages. The child entity definition can inherit one or more metadata