In modern creative pipelines, data is often managed by an authoritative system (Asset Management System, Digital Asset Manager, MAM, et. al).
It is common for media creation tools to reference this managed data by its present location in a file system.
OpenAssetIO enables tools to reference managed data by identity (using an "Entity Reference") instead of a file system path.
This is achieved through the definition of a common set of interactions between a host of the API (eg: a Digital Content Creation tool or pipeline script) and an Asset Management System.
This common API surface area removes the need for common pipeline business logic to be re-implemented against the native API of each tool, and allows the tools themselves to design new workflows that streamline the creation of complex assets.