The concepts of content and metadata ingestions are described in the following points.

According to the Terms of Use you may be a registered user. A registered user can be a Private User (also called Simple Registered User) or an user beloing to a Content Provider, that may be a partner of the portal. Each Content Provider may have unlimited registered users. Any registered or content provider should accept the classical Terms of Use to upload any content on the portal.
 

Private Users

If you are a Private User and you are registered on you can upload your content via the Fast Upload Service page.
Once uploaded a content, with metadata information, you will be entitled to re-edit and enrich metadata by using the Metadata Editor. The content will be verified and passed to publication as soon as possible. The Edit Object functionality/action (accessible via the Action Menu of your objects) allows you to: edit/change metadata, upload a different icon/thumbnail, update the digital file, upload a new version of the digital file, update/change the classification, etc. 

Content Providers (contractors or affiliated partners)

The Content Providers are institutions and/or companies that can fully exploit the services, facilities and tools for massive ingestion of content and metadata, content enrichment, as described in the following (many other features are also available for Content Providers andare described in other web pages and in the User Manual).

So that, regarding content ingestion, Content Providers can provide and exploit services for providing:

• single content/item and metadata: can be uploaded in one shot via the upload on Service Portal by using the Upload Service and web page. Please note that you can upload any kind of content file format and type, and of any size (more than 500 file formats and kinds are managed). The ingestion is capable to cope with them for you automatically, without your intervention!!! Once uploaded the Edit Object functionality/action (accessible on the Action menu of the object) allows you to: edit metadata, upload a different icon/thumbnail, update the digital file, upload a new version of the digital file, update/change the classification, and define the IPR model via the IPR Wizard, etc. (not active on SMNET)
• multiple/massive content/items and metadata This can be performed in one shot by using the upload on the  Portal by using the Upload Service and web page. You can select in the file selection dialog several files at the same time. It is a batch process that is suitable, for example, to upload all files related to an event (having the same metadata) and being contained in the same directory of your computer. This model for content upload works quite well up to 150 files every time, in a single click. These files can be of different type, size, format, extension, etc., and may share most of the metadata, you can specialize for each of them the Title. The  ingestion is capable to ingest and manage them automatically for you!!!
• massive ingestion of metadata and then providing content files.  This last facility is the most powerfull to upload huge amount of content. Millions of items con be uploaed in a single action. This feature is not available on SMNET.

 
The massive ingestion model is capable to ingest in one click hundred thousands of content, files and items at the same time. The web page for massive content ingestion can cope with hundreds of content items at the same time, up to 1 GByte per file in the case of direct upload, while in the case of FTP there is no limit, via FTP you can upload even singles files of 20Gbytes each, for example, and millions of files. 
 
The Content Providers (which passed their metadata set via the Metadata Ingestion Service according to the a specific Metadata Ingestion Model) may use different solutions to provide their content/item files as:

• one by one upload/update of content files and/or metadata via the Update facility, available on the content Actions menu for each single object, but only for the user that has uploaded/provided the content. Please click on Edit Object action/functionality, from lists of content or from the right side block of actions and chose the file update facility.The Edit Object functionality/action allows you to: edit metadata, upload a different icon/thumbnail, update the digital file, upload a new version of the digital file, update/change the classification, etc.  
• massive content upload via internet, including the corresponding links/URLs (or FTP location for files) into the metadata set you provided, and make them accessible via your web/ftp facility for direct download. In this case, the portal back office service is going to  automatically do all the dirty work of download from your servers the files and will perform the joining of them with your metadata;
• massively content via FTP. In this case, you can post your content file via FTP, on the FTP Service. In these cases the Content Provider has to accompain/include one or more files with a list of associations between the ingested metadata records and each single content file. These associations of content file and metadata could be based on Content Provider unique ID  (for the metadata record identification) and/or an AXOID (adopted unique ID, accessible to the portal), and the simple file name to identify the provided content. The content provider ID or other identifier can be directly located in the source metadata of your metadata set, etc., if possible. A manual association of the file with metadata can also be performed on the portal if the ID is not available. The Content Provider has to provide single content files via FTP. For FTP posting please ask to get credentials to smnet@disit.org (to receive your account and password). The FTP site may ingest more than 200 Gbytes of content per day, each single file can be even greater then 20 Gbytes, for example.
• massively content via physical media, providing hard disk or DVD/CD data ROM or HD or tapes. In these cases the Content Provider has to accompain/include one or more files with a list of associations between the ingested metadata records and each single content file. These associations of content file and metadata can be based on Content Provider unique ID  (for the metadata record identification) and/or an AXOID (ECLAP adopted unique ID, accessible to the portal), and the simple file name to identify the provided content. The content provider ID or other identifier can be directly located in the source metadata of your metadata set, etc., if possible. A manual association of the file with metadata can also be performed on the portal if the ID is not available. Audio or Video CD/DVD to be ripped are not accepted as a valid format for providing content items. The Content Provider has to provide single content files, and them can be provided via DVD/CD ROM or HD. 

 

Once the content file/item is received, it is automatically associated with metadata by the back office tools. Exceptions are managed by the content ingestion team at DISIT DSI, the back office. Thus, to each of those content files, the maximum restrictions are applied according to the Terms of Use. Please note that, the content provided is automatically associated with the Content Provider channel/group, ONLY, and posed private of the group. Therefore, only Trusted User would be entitled to access at the content for the purpose of metadata and content validation and enrichment. Then, the authorized personnel by the Content Provider would be entitled to exploit all the ECLAP services for:

• metadata enrichment as for voting, leaving comments, tagging, creating annotations, collections, playlists (some of them are not active on SMNET);
• metadata translation via automated back office. This service is included in the back office content processing. Any Content provider can appreciate this service providing content. Moreover, each content provider can provide its content metadata validation/translation experts. 
• metadata edit, review and validation (via Metadata Editor), accessible only for the authorized person of the content provider and for the single user that uploaded their own content, including association with multiple groups, revision of taxonomical classification, review of all languages, review of technical metadata, etc.;
• IPR definition via the IPR Wizard (not active on SMNET). A tool accessible for the authorized persons indicated by each Content Provider (namely the IPR Manager of the channel/group). With the IPR Wizard, the IPR Manager can define and assign the IPR Model (restrictions and permissions) for each content of the group on the basis of the preferences and decisions of the Content Provider. The IPR Model also include a link to a web page in which you can put your licensing information and redirect the interested people to contact you, for example;
• content metadata publication on Europeana (not active on SMNET), accessible only for the authorized person of the Content Provider and group coordiantor. They can decide to make available for Europeana each single content metadata as well as a group of them. The portal and service is going to make automatic generation of the EDM format of metadata suitable for Europeana. If you are interested to see examples of metadata set provided to Europeana you can get it from your uploaded content into the block on metadata on right side of the web page.

These activities are orchestrated by using the so called Workflow Management tool integrated into the Portal and back office. More details regarding Tools can be recovered following this link.
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