Picture This! (hack day at Dev8D+)

The Picture This! event on image metadata was held at Dev8D+ on 15 February 2011 at the University of London Union (ULU) in Bloomsbury, London. It led into the Picture This! Developer Challenge at Dev8D on 16/17 February 2011.

The morning began with a brief, practical introduction to application profiles for image metadata by Talat Chaudhri of the Application Profiles Support Project, aimed at getting the attendees to think about the kinds of metadata solutions required for the specific problems that face them in dealing with images within the public-facing systems that they run in their institutions. He invited the attendees to think about the sorts of metadata and the kinds of relationships between images as related web resources that might be required in these systems.

The attendees then delivered some lightning talks, outlining the sorts of problem spaces that they are seeking to deal with in order to deliver image resources more successfully to users. Most of these centred around EXIF, IPTC, as well as ISO 19139 for geospatial metadata. Other metadata standards that were mentioned included NISO MIX and VRA. The talks were focussed on a range of issues including embedding image metadata within images, extracting metadata from images on services such as Flickr using the relevant API, auto-generation and enrichment of metadata, and visual surfacing of copyright and other information for users from embedded metadata within images. There was surprisingly little interest in managing relationships between images, for example where various different types of post-processing of a particular image has resulted in multiple related images that stem from the same original. It was also quite notable that comparatively little attention was given to subject metadata by attendees at the event. Holding the event at an event for developers may explain the relative lack of interest in these areas, which have been more significant issues at meetings of the Metadata Forum.

After lunch, the attendees formed into groups that included both metadata practitioners and developers, to address the issues raised by the lightning talks. They later delivered pitches based on these ideas, several of which fed into the Picture This! Developer Challenge at Dev8D. In addition to the attendees themselves, a number of additional developers who attended Dev8D+ offered their advice and collaboration, and dropped in and out of the afternoon session. This sharing of expertise highlighted the value of the collaborative approach taken at Dev8D, as well as directly helping practitioners with the problems that they had outlined during the morning session. Particular mention should be made of Ben O’ Steen and Ben Charlton for the considerable help that they gave to developers and practitioners throughout the day.

As part of theDev8D Developer Challenge, the Picture This! event offered prizes of Amazon vouchers for first and second prize for those who came up with the most innovative and practical solutions to identified problems using image metadata.

The first prize of a £50 Amazon voucher went to Robert Baker and Roger Greenhaigh for their work in extracting embedding copyright information from images and dynamically modifying images to include a banner including a logo displaying the licence, e.g. the specific type of Creative Commons licence, and the copyright holder. The judges felt that this relatively simple but highly effective idea again had enormous potential within the UK HE sector, not least as a time-saving device with instant visual impact that could be used widely by anybody wanting to know whether or not and how they could re-use a particular image.

The second prize of a £25 Amazon voucher went to Bharti Gupta for her work in embedding geospatial image metadata within map images, for example climate data, an idea that has enormous potential for re-use within the UK HE sector. By embedding the metadata in this way, the problem of managing images and metadata separately is removed and machine processing and transmission of map images over the web is significantly enriched without the need for metadata harvesting.

“Before”: Bharti Gupta talks about Picture This!

Ianthe Hind and Scott Renton worked on enriching image metadata using a range of techniques, the most ambitious of which was image recognition. Ianthe’s work on this challenge at Dev8D deserves special mention for the huge effort and wide range of technologies that she investigated for auto-generation of metadata. She showed that commonly available image recognition software is not yet capable of delivering the functionality that developers need to be able to make use of existing rich metadata on the web to describe new images of known objects, places or landmarks, which would avoid the need for constant duplication and time-consuming repetitious metadata entry.

“Before”: Ianthe Hind talks about Picture This!

The organisers of the event intend to follow up on and document these outputs, and ensure that they feed back into future meetings of the Metadata Forum. The day was highly successful, the attendees were enthusiastic and motivated, and the Dev8D event format was at its best in bringing practitioners with practical problems together with developers to address real, tractable problems and produce immediate solutions and demonstrations to solve them.