[w3photo] Worthwhile (rambling) status report and motivational email...

On Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at 06:34  PM, Jim Ley wrote:

> Sorry to be a pain in the arse, but is there any chance of an agenda, 
> or
> something which could point me at the URLS I should read so I can get 
> back
> up to speed before the meeting?

You are hardly a pain in the arse, Jim. Perhaps a pleasant shiatsu in 
the Gluteus Maximus, if anything. (^_^)

Let me see if I can offer a worthwhile catch-up of sorts.  And let me 
add it is good to get a note from you, and this is a good time to get 
back in the loop for everyone.

W3Photo Update, 03/04/2004
===========================
On one hand, the w3photo project is behind scheduled from the original 
timeline. We only have an alpha repository, and tweaking continues with 
the image vocab. As a result, integrating work from Southhampton 
(AKTive Space) and UMD Mindswap got delayed, too.

On the other hand *excellent*, far-reaching work is being done on 
important details creating ontology schemas and addressing issues 
related to incorporating images and image meta-data with the semantic 
web.   Since 2000/2001 by my estimate, various parties in this group 
have been exploring different aspects of how emerging semantic web 
tools would work with photo.  Now we are actually coordinating that 
developed expertise, and working our way through the issues.

Also *exciting* is that this work on w3photo is happening concurrently 
to major developments in the semantic web and digital imaging:
- W3C hit a major milestone in the making public working draft of the 
RDF spec
	http://news.com.com/2100-1001-203893.html
- O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in mid-Feb included lots of 
relevant stuff (and was attended by several of us): 
http://www.oreillynet.com/et2004/
	- Dan Brickley led a couple of sessions on FOAF: 
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4428
	- There was a collaborative mapping workshop all conference long 
(which clearly fits with 		photos: http://locative.net/etcon/plan.pl
	- There were several sessions around digital images, including a 
preview of Nokia
		"personal content" application that resides on phone and PC; and a 
presentation
		on Microsoft's research project Wallop by Lilly Chen which featured 
(you guessed it)
		selecting areas of photos.
	- Ludicorp.com revealed a *very* fun image sharing application 
(HTML+Flash) combining
		Orkut like social networking, chat, and incredibly easy image file 
sharing. I *highly*
		recommend trying it with a friend.
		http://www.flickr.com (no "e")
		http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1526442,00.asp
- There are some incredible stats I'm hearing regarding how digital 
cameras overtook film cameras in 2003 and the phonecam is incredibly 
successful, shipping tens of millions of units.

Last night, I showed W3photo to someone less familiar with the 
semantic-web and I felt a sense of excitement about the details we are 
working out; what it will mean to have this kind of meta-data available 
for images.  So special congrats to Dan Brickley and Libby Miller. They 
are hitting some major milestones with their official work while 
keeping involved in this upstart project. Thanks to the other persons 
on this list who deserve credit for the RDF spec, FOAF, etc, and I'm 
failing to mention properly.

That's the big picture. Things are behind schedule but behind because 
lots of very relevant and exciting things are happening.

Let me move toward the specifics of the alpha version of the 
repository, the image vocab status, and what I hope will happen at the 
IRC today and on through March.

We are trying to re-use existing vocabularies where appropriate. So the 
W3PhotoVocab borrows from several vocabularies: DC, FOAF, Creative 
Commons, Mindswap, etc. The project's unique contribution seems to be 
in working out the combination and specific details around image 
regions.

Libby has summarized the W3PhotoVocab. She's made a table of the 
relevant vocabularies with pointers to their documentation and a 
description of what's required and optional. This is the page I'm using 
for converting Fotonotes XML to RDF:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/W3PhotoVocabs

Being new to RDF myself, I'm feeling a bit uncertain that I'm 
understanding all the emails that Benjamin, Morten, and Libby have been 
batting about recently which is carrying on the discussion from 
January. However, I *believe* Benjamin has put together what is the 
most current documentation on a RDFS/OWL ontology regarding image 
regions:
http://www.bnowack.de/w3photo/pages/image_spec_rdfsowl
http://www.bnowack.de/w3photo/pages/image_doc_rdfsowl

Benjamin, please correct me here, but I believe your above material 
tries to reflect everyone's input and  represent the ideas Morten 
summarized in his Jan 21 comprehensive email 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2004Jan/0096.html>?

It is also proposed that the name space for the image vocab be:
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/image#
(or actually maybe)
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/image-regions#
Nothing is at these spaces, yet, though.

So I believe the above are best links for describing the vocabularies 
for image regions as it now stands. I'm working to incorporate those 
into the Alpha Repository.

One of the lessons I think we draw from the project so far is the 
overhead required to properly create the meta-data for sharing a photo. 
The metadata must clearly indicate the resource (e.g. photo) being 
shared as well as the resource describing the license, parameters 
related to license (e.g., date of photo), the resource(agent) enacting 
the license, etc.  I suspect this 'overhead' will becomes easier and 
easier to do, but working out how to gather all this information into a 
photo for which none of it exists created some interesting workflow 
challenges, challenges that we are still working out.

The Alpha Repository is online at http://w3photo.org/photos/ and it is 
best to play in the sandbox at http://w3photo.org/photos/test/

Although there are User Interface bugs and improvements required, it is 
hoped the basic architecture for this repository is now in place and 
people should feel free to register and upload photos. We are keeping 
track of bugs at: http://esw.w3.org/topic/W3PhotoBugs .

The agenda for today's IRC is pretty lose:

 From 15:00 GMT to 16:00 GMT we want to continue the discussion of image 
vocab and see if we can resolve any open issues.  Within this hour I 
also wanted to discuss the W3Photo.org site.

 From 16:00 GMT to 17:00 GMT we want to get back to integrating our new 
capability of annotating photos with the W3 conferences and conference 
materials. In other words, we want to look at details of incorporating 
the Event-related ontology with the Image Description ontology (or 
vice-versa depending on your point of view).

The agenda is loose for both parts of the chat. However let me propose 
a more detailed agenda.

15:00 - greetings and general questions
15:10 - show-n-tell of posted vocabs; what's online
15:20 - discuss http://www.bnowack.de/w3photo/pages/image_doc_rdfsowl
15:40 - discuss w3photo.org website, w3photo.org/photos repository
		- changes needed to explanatory site
		- prioritize bug fixes, other changes to repository
		- action items, summarize

16:00 - greetings, summarize first half for people just joining this 
section
16:10 - Update from Southampton
16:20 - Update from Mindswap
16:30 - Discuss Event Vocab issues
16:45 - Begin wrapping up

That's my best summary. Corrections appreciated.

Greg Elin

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Received on Thursday, 4 March 2004 09:43:09 UTC