DigitalWell™

DigitalWell™ is a grid-enabled asset management system that provides an easy way to acquire, collect, classify, store and deliver large collections of digital media over IP-based networks.

Media assets are too often created and collected by disparate organizations and departments both within and among institutions. As a result, many broadcast stations, colleges, schools and departments have a difficult time retaining and sharing digital resources in a way that is flexible and enables repurposing of resources for research over the long term.

DigitalWell™ addresses these problems by streamlining and simplifying the acquisition, aggregation, cataloging, storage, discovery and delivery processes associated with managing digital content. In particular, DigitalWell™ enables access to high-quality, high-definition video and audio assets via next generation IP networks.

As a digital library, DigitalWell™ provides an ideal infrastructure for meeting the demands of supporting large digital media collections in concert with large numbers of media administrators and consumers. Thus, DigitalWell™ is suited for use by the entire K–20 community for teaching, learning and research.

In the broadcast world, DigitalWell™ automates the capture of production-quality digital assets for post-production work and subsequent transcoding for on-demand access. Digital programming and associated metadata are maintained in scalable, tiered storage systems and are tightly integrated with a station’s broadcast traffic system. 

Federation/Access Enablers

DigitalWell™ is interoperable with other leading digital library systems and data grids based on San Diego Supercomputing Center’s Storage Resource Broker.  SRB is best-described as a federation and access enabler for data grids. SRB provides an abstraction layer that virtualizes back-end storage architecture and simplifies metadata mapping across content management systems. At Supercomputing 2005, ResearchChannel demonstrated a collaborative high-definition video capture and editing environment that included international sites connected via SRB technology over next-generation networks. Other mainstream digital library systems incorporating SRB include MIT’s D-Space and Cornell’s Fedora.

Because DigitalWell™ is content format agnostic, it supports a wide range of digital media types, including documents, photos, audio, video and raw research data sets. DigitalWell™ on-demand streaming services support industry-standard media formats (e.g., Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, MPEG2, MPEG4, HDCAM) at bitrates and resolutions ranging from dail-up modem speeds to studio-quality uncompressed high-definition audio and video.

DigitalWell™ includes an easy-to-use Web services-based programming interface for developing new research applications and teaching tools. WebISO authentication and integrated access control mechanisms ensure secure operational channels between digital assets and associated applications. An RSS conduit provides a means for sharing content and metadata with other repositories and program distribution systems. DigitalWell™’s scalable federated architecture seamlessly interconnects media collections to disparate networked communities. 

Collections

While continuing to expand its broadcast program library in DigitalWell™, ResearchChannel is also adding new collections, including content from collaboration partners such Microsoft Research.

Open Source

ResearchChannel recently announced plans for DigitalWell™ to be made open source in early 2006. With the completion of a planning phase for this initiative, ResearchChannel is meeting with a participating group of trusted partners at the Spring Internet2 2006 conference.

For more information on DigitalWell™, contact us.