Cumulus can manage related assets and provides a user interface that displays these relations and also enables the user to determine relations between assets.
Relation Types
Relations can be different, there are hierarchical and flat relations. In a hierarchical relation one is special, it might be the master or the preferred one, it might be the source... By default, following types of hierarchical relations between assets are supported by Cumulus:
1. Contain/Contained – An asset contains other assets: e.g. a Zip archive, a PowerPoint presentation that contains slides, an InDesign or PDF document that contains pages.
2. References/Referenced – An asset includes references to other assets: e.g. a PowerPoint presentation or an InDesgin document that includes references to the images on the slides/pages.
3. Variants – Assets derive from the same source asset: e.g. the PDF of a Word document, an image stored in different file formats or renditions of an image (for example cropped or with a filter employed.)
NOTE: Whether variants and alternates are available with the current catalog depends on the catalog’s settings defined by your Catalog Administrator.
4. Alternates – Assets that you want to group concerning a certain topic and for which you have a preferred one that you want to represent the others. (For example, you have a series of images on the same topic and the preferred one is the one you decided to use for your current project.)
In addition to these relations, a CumulusCatalog Administrator can add other hierarchical relations to a catalog – so called custom relations.
And in addition to hierarchical relations, you might want to determine groups of ’equal’ assets. Assets that you want to group concerning a certain topic, theme or task but to which you don’t want to designate a preferred member. Cumulus offers support for this demand: assign the assets to the same category. However, this well-known way of defining groups is included in the Cumulus management for related assets (referred to as relation type 5).
Another type of relation between assets is the versions managed by a Version Control System (e.g. Cumulus Vault). Support for this type of relation is not yet included in the Managing Related Assets concept of Cumulus. Use the Version History window to have the versions displayed. (See “Managing Versions”, for details.)
