As more consumer services are delivered over networks and companies look to secure competitive advantage through more effective targeting, concern for the protection of individual privacy and security is set to grow. In April 2009, the European Commission announced it is to take legal action against alleged UK contravention of EU data laws on the use of advertising technology Phorm.

The ability of creative businesses to manage, analyse and interpret data is increasingly becoming critical to success, driven by:

• accelerated transitions from an analogue to a digital world and the associated explosion of content on the Internet;
• challenges of tracking, locating, managing and storing digital assets in networked environments; and
• increases in product complexity and growth in the distributed working/ outsourced model of collaborative working.

The importance of globally accepted and implemented information infrastructures, standards and protocols has been long acknowledged and developed by the individual sub-sectors (e.g. ISBN numbers in publishing, XML on the web). In an increasingly converged world, there is a need for more than just a descriptive nature of the asset – for example technical, ownership, rights access information. To be useful, the meta-data associated with any content needs to remain linked with the asset and be able to be interpreted on potentially multiple platforms.