Directory Management Studio

Easily manage your concession, facility, and service assets and drive content channels such as digital signage, web, mobile, and print with Directory Management Studio from Art of Context

Digital Wayfinding undoubtedly improves a traveler’s experience, allowing them to navigate with ease and reduce stress. To deliver these experiences, administrators need a management system that integrates with their existing tools to easily manage, extract and supply location based data. To meet this need Art of Context (AOC) developed Directory Management Studio (DMS), a purpose-built system for directory asset management.

DMS extends the power of content management systems and digital signage tools to easily build interactive maps that drive passengers to concessions and increase revenues. On the backend, DMS provides a unified data stream to reduce the effort and cost of entering information in multiple systems, extending information across diverse channels such as digital signage, website, mobile, and print directories.

DMS is currently used by some of North America’s busiest airports

BOS – BWI – DTW – JAX – PIT – YYC

DMS Key Features

  • Extend Location Data – Purpose built to manage the location and concession specific information required to maintain all of your directories on any channel.
  • Multilingual Management – Communicate with travelers in their native language.
  • Manage Your Assets – Drag and drop locations to a map instead of cumbersome plotting or complex GIS.
  • Deploy With Ease – Cloud/SaaS or hosted on premises within your firewall and manage updates from the web, mobile or a tablet.
  • Deliver Accuracy – All channels receive the same changes in real time.

DMS Administration

Drag and Drop Simplicity
DMS is centrally managed and has a user friendly administrative interface.

DMS is centrally managed and has a user friendly administrative interface. The system uses HTML5 standard drag and drop for placing assets on a map. The administrator simply drags an asset into place to create a new instance on the map.

This new instance will inherit all the properties of the parent asset but offers the admin the flexibility to easily override configured properties for that specific instance (i.e. a location specific store front photo).


Directory-Management-Studio-Config-754x1024Powerful Configuration

DMS is powerful and easy to configure. Administrators can easily customize attributes to meet their unique needs.

Multi-Channel Publishing

Envision an admin who needs to publish updates to a concession description in multiple locations. With Directory Management Studio, the admin only needs to make the changes one time in one place. Once published, the dynamic media will update instantly to any channel – digital signage, web, or mobile.

Don’t Forget Print Assets

Print asset templates can also be updated by the sign shop without additional data entry, this ensures accurate and timely information across all channels.

Multiple Directories

Organizations with multiple directories and/or large campuses will find Directory Management Studio to be particularly helpful. With DMS, an administrator can manage multiple directories and share assets among those directories in one place.

Responsive Design

Administrators can access and update data from any desktop, tablet or mobile device.

DMS Driven Channels

Digital Signage Integration 

Directory Management Studio powers custom digital sign and kiosk interactive directories for some of the busiest airports in the U.S. & Canada. Systems are hosted on inexpensive, high security, no maintenance Chrome devices. They provide travelers with up-to-date information and through the use of QR codes and SMS offer passengers the opportunity to take their wayfinding with them on any mobile device.

For examples of DMS driving interactive maps, you can visit

Screen captures of Interactive maps at PIT, BWI and BOS

A screen capture of the BOS interactive Map on a mobile phoneMobile

The same RESTful API that feeds information to websites and digital signage can also powers mobile applications. 

DMS in Action

Here are just a few examples of DMS in action.

Photos of DMS driven displays at BOS, JAX and DTW

Learn More about DMS

To learn more about how Directory Management Studio can help you improve passenger experience, please contact Lee Ryan at lryan@artofcontext.com or call 617-606-9797.