Recent Updates:
With the growing popularity of digital photography, amateur
photographers face the prospect of having hundreds if not thousands
of photos to label and organise. Current photo annotation tools allow
users to organise their collections in sophisticated ways, and many
people do this, but there is no way to share this organisational work
over the Web. True, the photos themselves can be shared, and recently
a number of web portals have emerged for this purpose, but the
facilities for organising photographs on these sites remains crude.
Even if these facilities were to become more sophisticated, the user
cannot export this organisational work, so there is lock-in to the
portal on one hand, and lock-in to photo organisational tools on the
other. User choice would be best served by allowing the export of
organisational work in a standard format, so that different services
can pick up, use and add value to the photographic collection. The
semantic web metadata standard RDF is one promising candidate format.
Combining RDF with a decentralised architecture similar to that used
by blogs fosters the exchange of photographic metadata between
heterogeneous tools and communities. In addition, the open nature of
RDF means that photo sharers can contribute to, benefit from, and
enrich resources that are exchanged within digital social networks
such as blogs or FOAF.
We are currently building a simple portal to show how the metadata
that people are already creating can be published,
aggregated and shared.
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