Normalization

The phrase 'Normalization' is generally used when designing databases to hold asset metadata. This description is highly simplified but in essence it means to index or rationalise common groups of terms down to a series of numbers so that they can be searched more quickly. Normalized data is typically found in drop-down menus or sets of checkboxes. Fully normalized data is also considerably easier to manipulate, for example, if an index or ID is used to represent a tag, changing it once will cause all assets associated with that term to be updated also. Many of the biggest issues with normalization come when migrating data from a legacy system to a new Digital Asset Management system as the older application may not be as well normalized as the new one.