XMP is the metadata format of Adobe. It has very good support in the Creative Suite products, and is supposed to be a widespread standard. We hope to find some use for it soon, since we're adding support for it into the new version of our digital asset management software.
XMP has been around for a long time, but doesn't seem to be implemented very often. To be fair, we're mostly adding it to the DMP FLO Suite as a marketing feature. Sure, lots of prospects ask about XMP support. But strangely, not a single customer has found any use for it. The questions are always theoretical, as if it is expected of a digital asset management system.
So finally we just added the feature to see if it will have any effect. Maybe customers will start using XMP metadata in their FLO systems if it's commonly available. We hope so. To encourage it, here are some examples of thigs that will be possible.
The first and foremost use of metadata in images is still that it allows you to search for them afterwards in the digital asset management tools. And a big issue with this will always be data entry. A lot of asset management projects fail on this. If nobody enters the data, it can't be used. With XMP, some of the essential metadata can be entered very early on in the process of image or document creation. It can become part of your internal workflow to enter an image description (or keywords) in Photoshop or other Creative Suite products. This metadata can be extracted by assetFLO, and used to search through the images.
Or maybe you are more interested in the rights information of your assets. These could be used to be visualized in the download center that contains the images. Or they might result in different download logic for the images (e.g.: not allowed to download). They can contain a lot of rules for digital asset management.
Or you could have use for the proofing or ad tickets of the Ghent Workgroup. Lots of Soft Proofing applications exist in the DMP FLO Suite. And obviously a lot of you create template based ads in some front site.
Please let us know. We would love to hear that our work on this will have some real use!