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General Concepts

The main entity of the content fabric are “content objects”, identified by a short string starting with iq__. As such content objects are often called “iq"s for short. Each content object has a defined content type.

There are three main content types for purposes of this documentation:

• Index
• Image asset container
• Video Content objects all have tree-structured metadata, and may have parts (for videos), and/or additional files stored “in” a content object (such as image assets).

An index is a content object which indexes tag data stored on other content objects. To perform a search, the iq__ of an index object is needed along with a search term; the search will find content matching the given term that is present in the index object.

Videos are usually stored in their own content object (which can have multiple streams, for example english or french audio.)

In contrast, image assets are typically stored as “files” on (or in) another content object; for an image-based index this will be an image asset container object. To uniquely identify an image asset one needs both the “container” content object (iq) and the asset path within that content object.

Objects are versioned, and a specific version of an object is referred to by an object hash, which starts with hq__. There are references to specific versions of objects in API returns. When referring to content, in most cases hq__ are interchangeable with iq__ where the former references a specific version of an object, and the latter represents the “latest” version of the object.

Built-in Content “Representations”

One of the key features of the Content Fabric is the ability to create just-in-time representations of content. Video playout is one example - the media source is stored in a given format, and all the adaptive bit rate representations are created just-in-time as requested by a player.

Other examples are image processing (resizing, change of format), bulk file download (just-in-time creation of a zip file containing the files), media download (just-in-time creation of an mp4 file at a required resolution), search, and more.