The PROJECT

The scientific collaboration project “ART-e-FAKT - Seamless Media-Artefact Management”, sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the initiative KMU-Innovativ, for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), launched January 1st 2013 and over a period of two years focuses on IT-solutions for various problems caused by media discontinuities, particularly in the administration and management of business data within the music industry.

The commercialisation and marketing of cultural goods take place in the digital world without defined processes in regard to technical realisations, application and interfaces. Developing this market poses a challenge, since market participants are generally small and very small companies. Therefore, companies lack the resources to initiate their own process definitions and implementations of an information and knowledge management system for the whole value chain of the creative industry sector.

Due to the diversity of market participants, there is a very high need for an IT-supported artefact management system that is free of media discontinuities, and that thereby abandons manual copying processes. The sheer number of non-assigned license shares to copyright owners and originators clearly highlights the urgent demand for an integrated solution.

The project addresses these issues by researching solutions that will support artefact management through the application of modern technologies to provide a flawless data flow between market participants.

The items of interest (e.g. music audio tracks) are designated as artefacts. These artefacts contain information: so-called meta-data, which are important for the assignment of property, inventory management and marketing.

The goal of the project is to establish a continuous management of such business-data to eliminate error sources based on the manual transmission and transfer processes, as well as to increase the efficiency of working processes by applying appropriate information technologies. ART-e-FAKT is coordinated by the Berlin-based music firm, Piranha Artshttp://www.piranha.de/. They are an internationally established player in the music business – with their label and publishing division as well as with the international b2b conference and trade fair WOMEX. The IT service provider Ageto, based in Jena, will realise a platform and IT-architecture for the music industry. Scientific support is provided by the Institute for Applied Information Science (InfAI), University of Leipzig.

Our other partners can offer significant practical support; some of them, indeed, have direct experience with our current project. For instance, the Berlin based project partner Details, provider of label-administration and royalty accounting software of the same name, will incorporate its 15-year long practical experience into the project. The law firm Boehmert & Boehmert will shed light on the legal aspects involved in handling the different business data between right-holders. Furthermore, the collecting societies GEMA and GVL, the independent music network http://vut.de/VUT , and the software company SAPhttp://www.sap.de/ are amongst the stakeholders interested in solving this important issue, and thus will collaborate as associated and cooperative partners in order to find an effective solution.

The project is funded by the "Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)". The funding number is 01IS12035.