I picked the name 'asset' as an alternative to 'resource', a term that already has too many disparate meanings on different platforms. That said, assets are used in the same situations that MacOS/Win32/BeOS resources would be, although the mechanism is more flexible.

The data making up an asset tree is directly usable by any processor, big or little-endian. It can be kept in a file, loaded into RAM, memory-mapped from disk or accessed from a stream.