Digital Assets and How They're Accessed

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Digital assets and how they're handled when using Alegion as a managed platform

For our purposes here, "digital assets" refers to image, video, and audio files, as well as text documents used in our Named Entity Recognition tool. For these types of task, the Alegion platform does not need to read your digital assets. Since it is a web application, the user's browser must be able to load the asset, but there are a variety of ways to limit access, as described below.

 

The platform's minimal data footprint

Note that in any case, the platform will retain the asset's URL as well as the annotations. For instance, a simple image annotation record with one bounding box might look like this:

{
    url: 'https://someurl/someimage.jpg',
    coords: ...,
    classification: 'Basset Hound'
 }
 
(Note: this is an illustration of metadata that the platform stores but not the actual format. For a representative sample, see this article: Result sample of an annotated video (JSON))

Finally, the input record for form-based tasks will contain whatever data you need to display to the labeler to perform the task. In these cases, Alegion will work with you to maximize security of sensitive data, but even in these tasks, digital assets are handled by the same techniques explained here.

 

Fully managed security (Alegion-hosted)

By default, Alegion hosts digital assets in our secure S3 buckets (AWS) in a US availability zone. Signed URLs allow access within a limited time-to-live (TTL) window. Once the TTL automatically expires, attempts to load the asset will fail.

In this option, we manage copies of your files and generate the signed URLs. Assets can be transferred into our S3 buckets through secure cloud-to-cloud pipelines, or manual methods such as SFTP, Filecloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

 
We have preconfigured tools for ingesting data from AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and ownCloud. Other clouds can be supported on request.

asset-access-method-1-fully-managed_new.png

 

Self-hosted assets

In this option, Alegion never has a copy of your digital assets, and you manage access restrictions. In either case, the Alegion platform only knows the asset's URL. You host the asset on the cloud or datacenter of your choice.

asset-access-method-2-self-hosted_new.png

 

Securing assets at the end user level

Alegion uses and supports a wide range of labeler-facing security security options and can tailor them to your exact needs. For details, please see this article: The human side of data stewardship.

 
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