[new use case suggestion] Use Case - Digital imaging lifecycle

Samsung Enterprise Portal mySingleDear Daniel, Felix, all,

I'm currently involved in the design of a metadata ontolgy for JPEG images. 
With this in mind, I've seen that the Photo Use Case in MAWG just covers 
partially the more generic Digital Still Image use case that we are 
targetting at JPEG. So, I suggest to the group a new use case (which could 
be maybe merged with the Photo Use Case). I've made an initial text, what do 
you think ?

If agreed, I could extend the content of the use case with further details.

Thanks and best regards,

Ruben


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Use case - Digital imaging lifecycle

Digital still images are not only real world digital photographs. A digital 
image may be obtained from another image in an analog medium, such as 
photographs, photographic film, or printed paper, by a scanner or similar 
device. The original image from which the digital image is derived can 
represent real world scenes, but it can also represent paintings, drawings, 
charts, maps, microfilmed books, etc. A digital image can be obtained also 
by complex processing of non-image data, such as those acquired with 
tomographic equipment. Finally, a digital image can also be generated from 
scratch, it can be obtained from a graphics editing program such as Adobe 
Illustrator, it can be generated by a non-interactive computer program, or 
it can even be written by hand with a hexadecimal text editor (or even an 
ASCII editor considering that ASCII Art is a form of digital imaging).

So a digital still image is the result of a chain of distinct intellectual 
or artistic creation stages, i.e. a digital imaging lifecycle. This chain 
can (uses to) be very complex, as shown by the following example:
"An artistic painter finishes his last creation which is a self portrait 
painted with oil. His wife, a professional photographer, takes a photo of 
the painting with her new digital camera. Finally, their son performs some 
improvements with a known graphics editing program".

The example shows a digital still image resulted from a chain of three 
distinct creation stages. Independently of the involved digital rights 
management issues, the specific metadata of the distinct creation stages 
should be preserved for search&retrieval tasks. E.g. "I'm looking for big 
JPEG images of paintings authored by Picasso and obtained from photos by 
David Meyer not digitally altered".

Professionals dealing with digital imaging include but are not limited to 
photographers and other visual arts professionals (digital painters, graphic 
designers, etc.), scientific and other technical professionals (medical 
professionals, astronomers, physicists, biologists, etc.), preservation 
professionals and end users. Satisfying their needs requires capturing the 
knowledge of the digital imaging domain in its full complexity. The 
resulting model should allow a clear separation of the different creation 
stages and all the involved elements, which implies representing not only 
metadata about the features of the final digital image, but also metadata 
about the related images from which is derived, about their medium 
(photographic film, canvas, paper, etc.) and format (film size, compression, 
etc.), about the techniques (photography, scanning, engraving, graffiti, 
lithography, etc.) and styles (expressionism, realism, etc.) used, about the 
tools (camera models, etc.) and their configurations (exposure time, flash, 
etc.).

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Ruben Tous, Ph.D
Email: rtous@ac.upc.edu
Web: http://personals.ac.upc.edu/rtous/
Affiliation: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Address: 
   Office C6-123 Campus Nord
   Departament d'Arquitectura de Computadors
   Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya 
   Jordi Girona street, 1-3
   08034 Barcelona (SPAIN)
Mobile phone: +34-678544449
Phone: +34-934054044
Fax: +34-934017055

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