Key concepts

What are assets?

An asset represents an information unit within the censhare system. It always consists of descriptive information, the metadata or properties, and optionally, storage items.

Each time an asset is altered, a new version of the asset is created. Information is not overwritten, as older versions remain available. Search results normally return the current version of an asset. Older versions can be restored on demand and made into the current version. Assets can represent arbitrary information. This includes not only images, text, videos, layouts, and products, but also more abstract objects such as lists, product types or groups.

Assets can be brought into a semantic connection with one another via relations. 

What are asset relations?

Assets can be arbitrarily interconnected with relations and thereby brought into a semantic relationship with one another. Relations are used to represent logical and technical dependencies between assets, model information structures, connect templates and manage asset variants. Structures can be as complex as deemed necessary. Versioning takes account of relations.

censhare provides a range of standard relation types with special functions. It is possible to define custom relation types whose function is defined by the corresponding application.

Relations in censhare have a direction. One can speak of two linked assets as having a parent-child relationship. Each asset can have any number of parent and child relationships with different relation types. Relations have a range of metadata or properties. Depending on the point of view, only particular metadata is set.

• If one looks at a relation from the point of view of a parent asset, the attributes are located in a child relation (child_asset_rel).
• As seen from the child asset, the metadata are in a parent relation (parent_asset_rel).

What are storage items?

If a file, for example, an image or a document is added to an asset, it is referred to as a storage item. An asset can contain zero or multiple storage items. If an asset has storage items, there is generally an explicitly allocated master storage item. A number of storage items are automatically derived from the master storage item.
With a picture asset, for example, the master storage item is the original image file in high resolution. Variants of this image file, such as those with lower resolution or a different color space, are separate storage items. Storage items have their own metadata which is determined by the MIME type of the associated file.

What you can see and do in censhare

In censhare, what you can see and do is defined by the following:

• Roles and permissions. These define which workspace you can work in and which task you are allowed to do in censhare. Roles control the access to work areas, applications, and functions.
• Domains. Your roles and permissions are associated with domains. You can only see and search for those assets in the system that belong to the domain that is assigned to you, as well as all subdomains of your domain. Assets from sibling and parental domain nodes remain invisible and inaccessible to you.

Your administrator defines and preconfigures your default domain, your role and permissions based on your responsibilities, work areas and tasks.