1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to asset management, and in particular to a flexibly adaptable, i.e. configurable and/or extensible, system for deploying asset management functions to client applications. The present invention further relates to other features of an asset management system, including encapsulating data with its behaviors for transferring information between databases and client applications and enabling client applications to adapt to specific constraints of the data, dynamically customizing and extending functions of a server program to enable and restrict functions of the server, and configurably mapping between data stores and data structures, thereby providing a generalized client data model.
2. Description of the Related Art
Assets, which represent data, must be properly managed for their value to be maximized. These assets may represent data in the form of text, full-motion video, audio, graphics, or images, for example. Regardless of the asset form, asset solutions are needed having sufficient storage capacity, scalability and sophisticated searching techniques.
Assets can be stored in physical storage devices, for example, in various searchable databases. Most existing database applications provide searching and manipulation capabilities for only a specific asset or data type for a specific database. However, such existing applications lack the flexibility to be imported to different databases or to handle different asset or data types. At the same time, creation of the assets can be accomplished for a specific client problem in existing applications, but cannot be expanded to cover a generic situation.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,745,754 to Lagarde et al., an example of an existing system, teaches a system for querying databases located on multiple platforms, processing data obtained, and presenting processed data to a client. The system includes an application-processing agent (web server), which performs tasks in a distributed environment based on received requests from the client. However, Lagarde et al. does not provide the flexibility of the present invention.
As the development of modern digital media continues, the volume of assets is growing rapidly. This rapid increase in assets requires the development of efficient asset management technology through integration of the technologies of information capture, storage management and search and retrieval.
To overcome the limitations in the prior art described above, and to solve various problems that will become apparent upon reading and understanding of the present invention, the present invention provides a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for computer-implemented management of assets in an object oriented environment.
In accordance with the present invention, a flexibly adaptable, i.e., configurable and/or extensible, asset management system is disclosed for processing and manipulating assets, representing data. The system comprises three layers: a Client Application layer, for manipulating and browsing assets, an Asset Manager Server layer, for providing programming interface services specific to assets types, such as storing, querying, and retrieving assets representing data. The data is stored in a Data Store, representing the third layer of the system. The Asset Manager Server layer also provides communication services to support the Client Application layer and file transfer between the Client Application layer and the Asset Manager Server layer.
The Asset Manager Server layer includes several configurable modules, including a Client Adapter module, a Schema Adapter module and a Resources module.
An object of the present invention is to provide a framework that generalizes many existing techniques and provides a configurable and/or extensible asset management system, which is reusable for different client applications and data types.
Another object of the invention is to provide a system having a configurable Asset Manager Server.
A further object of the invention is to provide a system using classes, encapsulating data with its behaviors, for transferring data between databases and client applications.
Yet a further object of the invention is to provide a system capable of dynamically customizing and extending functions of an Asset Manager Server program.
Yet another object of the invention is to provide a system capable of configurably mapping between Data Stores and data structures.