Digital asset

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Digital Asset: A digital asset is any form of content and/or media that have been formatted into a binary source which include the right to use it. A digital file without the right to use it is not an asset. Digital assets are categorised in three major groups which may be defined as textual content, images and multimedia (van Niekerk, A.J. 2006. Allied Academies, New Orleans Congress).

An art asset, in computer graphics and related fields (particularly video game and visual effects production) is an individual piece of digital media used in the creation of a larger production. Art assets include synthetic and photographic bitmaps (often used for texture mapping, 3D models consisting of polygon meshes or curved surfaces), shaders, motion captured or hand-animated animation data, video and audio samples.

The term "art" is used to distinguish the creative (or real-world) elements of a production from the software or hardware used to create it: there is no requirement that the data represents anything artistic.

Digital asset management is expected to be a multi-billion dollar industry as corporations and individuals migrate traditional graphic, broadcast and print assets to the digital format. Companies including Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Getty Images and others are aggressively expanding their enterprises to provide third-party digital asset management via web-based repositories. This trend will continue as business and consumers evolve from traditional analog materials.