Prague core conversation followup

Based on the discussion today, I'll volunteer to bring in some experience in Digital Media Asset Library management, and open standards for metadata management.

I have a long-running sandbox project that handles embedded Metadata (EXIF/XMP)
https://drupal.org/sandbox/dman/1310856 and mapping to fieldable files (or the D6 equivalent at the time, which was files-as-nodes). This project or equivalent has actually existed in various forms since I had to Build it in 2007
- It's only a sandbox still because someone/something is squatting on my preferred project name.

RE Digital Assets - I research this every year for the last 6 years looking for suitable prior art to build on - I do Government archives, Museum online libraries, as well as distributed asset management for Advertising agencies (internal) and similar projects.
However, there is no front-runner I have found. The OSS options seem overly tied to solving just one task (eg library archives) very well, but are totally cumbersome or wrong for anything else. My opinion, there is no winner.

However, the one that does it most right (to me) was the Commercial Adobe Bridge - which is IMO underpromoted. Just as a model to look at with its (optional) client/server model and super XMP support.

Thanks for organising today's discussion, it is much needed. I made a point at the meeting and unfortunately wont be around on Friday but I am very interested in the development of this area of Drupal.

It is very disappointing that even file entity has not made it into Drupal 8 core and surely that is where we should start. The whole of media handling is a very wide issue and we are effectively starting from 0 so the points made that the problem needs breaking up are good. If Drupal core took care of base file handling and assigning and maintaining a basic file entity this would provide fieldable files and permissions out of the box. Other modules could then build on that to provide different UIs or other functionality. This might not immediately provide an all singing all dancing media solution but it would provide a framework on which complimentary instead of competing modules could be built. Potentially the best of these could be brought into core in future releases. We have two(?) modules that already do this so surely we can use them?

Clearly the bigger picture including all the various real life use cases need to be included in the thinking but at this stage if we stick to the base functionality in core this is a manageable problem that would make the development of contrib media modules much easier and would bring files into line with everything else in Drupal which is now an entity, with all the advantages that brings.

From my limited understanding media / file entity and scald are the two leading modules on this and they do the base stuff slightly differently but have considered the main end use cases in reaching the points they're at. So how about the following:
Lock scald and file entity developers in a room and don't let them out until they've worked out a sound base file entity structure we can work with.
at the same time ask the community for real world use cases, accepting that many comments will be about look and feel which is less relevant now.
put the two together and review whether the proposed base will meet the majority of use cases and adjust as necessary.

I would be happy to provide our own use case and potentially to help collate others, at which point I will realise that I have a very simplistic view of it all!

I just posted our sprint to DrupalCon website. See you tomorrow at 10:00.