Digital asset

A digital asset, in essence, is anything that exists in a binary format and comes with the right to use. Data that do not possess that right are not considered assets. Digital assets include but are not exclusive to: digital documents, audible content, motion picture, and other relevant digital data that are currently in circulation or are, or will be stored on digital appliances, including, but not exclusive to, personal computers, laptops, portable media players, tablets, storage devices, telecommunication devices, and any and all apparatuses which are, or will be in existence, once technology progresses to accommodate for the conception of new modalities which would be able to carry digital assets; notwithstanding the proprietorship of the physical device onto which the digital asset is located.

Types of digital assets include, but are not exclusive to: photography, logos, illustrations, animations, audiovisual media, presentations, spreadsheets, word documents, electronic mails, and a multitude of other digital formats and their respective metadata. The number of different types of digital assets is exponentially increasing due to the rising number of devices that are a conduit for digital media, e.g., smartphones. Due to this steadfast growth of software applications and immense diversity of user touchpoints covering a wide span of devices, our view of the total digital assets universe is growing. In Intel's presentation at the company’s "Intel Developer Forum 2013” they named several new types of digital assets including: medical, education, voting, friendships, conversations and reputation amongst others. In 2015, Forbes and other sources characterized bitcoin as a digital asset.

A digital asset management (DAM) system represents an intertwined structure incorporating both software and hardware and/or other services in order to manage, store, ingest, organise and retrieve digital assets. Digital asset management systems allow users to find and use content when they need it.

Metadata is data about other data. Any structured information whose purpose is to define a specification of any form of data is referred to as metadata. “An item of metadata is a relationship that someone claims to exist between two entities”. “Think of metadata as data which removes from a user (human or machine) the end to have full advance knowledge of the existence or characteristics of things of potential interest in the environment”. At first the term metadata was used for digital data exclusively, but nowadays metadata can apply to physical data as well as digital one. Catalogues, inventories, registers and other similar standardised forms of organising, managing and retrieving resources contain metadata. Metadata can be stored and contained directly within the file it refers to or independently from it with the help of other forms of data management such as a DAM system.

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Wikipedia