154 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age routines usually consumes less runtime memory and is faster than using our system built metadata framework. A direct result of per application optimization is that our framework consumes more memory and is slower when you compare it to a single application using its own metadata system, with it using our system wide metadata architecture. So the extra overhead of using our system will never be too much, so that its overall benefi ts are still greater than any slowness caused by it. 5.5 Overall Architecture Now it is time to look at the framework that is used to manage all these different kinds of metadata and, consequently, content. In this section, we describe the overall framework architecture, based on a metadata 14 and content lifecycle. Mobile phones used to be referred to as terminals. The word ter- minal suggests that the phone is the end of the line, where all com- munications either start or end. Modern mobile phones have now progressed far beyond being mere terminals. Today, the content, espe- cially media content, is also downloaded, created, and especially shared with others using mobile phones – or mobile devices, to be precise. These modern devices are becoming central nodes in content distribution, instead of sticking as end-points. For metadata manage- ment, it means that in addition to content, metadata must also travel in and out of the device, which we refer to as the metadata lifecycle. The framework described herein manages all kinds of metadata from the composer of a song to relationships between content objects. It covers all aspects of the metadata lifecycle. It also provides effi cient methods for searching and grouping content based on metadata, in many cases through associations. Figure 5-4 shows generic phases of a simplifi ed content (and metadata) lifecycle, and the required actions related to metadata. First, in the Entry/Import phase, new content enters the system (the “G” phase in GEMS). The content is either created in a mobile device, for instance using a built-in camera, or may have been downloaded off the net, or received as an e-mail. At that point, harvesters are set 14 Unlike GEMS, which describes the content lifecycle from the user’s perspective, this is a lifecycle from the system point of view. Nevertheless, the phases are similar to GEMS.