[w3photo] A Fotonotes/w3photo update

Rodney's hello made me aware of how quiet the list has been, and how 
quickly June went by.

So a little update...

Since December, Fotonotes was in major negotiations with a couple of 
photo-sharing players. The deals would have included support for an 
open standard and open source code. Those arrangements have not 
materialized.

Obviously, I couldn't say too much then and it doesn't make sense too 
say much now.  But one company fell through b/c they were too far into 
a new product's launch time-line to incorporate the functionality in 
the first release; the other fell through because of their inexperience 
in doing deals that supported open-source IP terms for technology (ok, 
maybe my inexperience, too).  Open standards and open source are the 
fuel and engine of the Internet which has driven so much innovation and 
new markets, IMHO. Nevertheless, living with that reality still 
involves a learning curve for many.

Hopefully, sharing this provides insight to my periodic silences on 
this list. Some big deals almost happened and would have created a 
great big tent for Fotonotes, w3photo and getting semantic data into 
photos.  Still, it's my opinion the next stage of how we work with 
digital images is indeed coming toward some kind of head.  And w3photo 
exercise has convinced me RDF and FOAF make sense as part of what comes 
next and that we are experimenting with the right things in this 
project.

The interest in rich annotation of the likes we all have been exploring 
independently and collaboratively has increased markedly between last 
year and this spring.  But, as expected, the big players still aren't 
sure what to do. So once more we are back to a few crazy programmers 
and hackers going where legitimate companies fear to tread. (Thanks, 
TBL, for teaching me that lesson in early 1990s. It seems it still 
holds true.)

And so ... ever onward ... to where things are now ... and what might 
come next ...

- I'm very close to an open source release of Fotonotes' code (PHP) and 
have a draft API document. (Both should be online soon, but I'm happy 
share early versions by request.) For those of you who eschew PHP, 
there is a Java version of the key classes (less developed) and a 
couple people have started on a port to Python.

- Any IP related to Fotonotes (including the pending patent) can be 
implemented royalty-free under the creative commons by attribution 
license. I imagine the attribution to be similar to the RSS buttons. So 
you are welcome to use the API and roll your own. Fotonotes has a 
couple of customers now...and I'm renewing conversations with a number 
of start-ups that want to support an image-region standard.

- There are questions that we, as a community, need to be addressing 
regarding the vocabularies and tools. WWW2004 was the demo app and 
*amazing* exercise for the vocabularies.  Is it a good time revisit 
those vocabs with what we learned? Or do we need more experiments? What 
is the best course for proposing a standard? Is this right time or 
premature? What else do we need to be thinking about? XMP? SVG? Steve 
Job's Key note?

- W3photo.org needs a code overhaul and a project plan for next steps. 
I've been totally lame in fixing things on the site, partly with paying 
the rent, partly with being over-optimistic about when the open source 
version ready. But it needs attention.

- W3photo and fotonotes NEEDS AN RDF PARSER. (Or more like Greg needs 
help integrating an RDF parser...) The major problem is that the RDF 
metadata my code is generating isn't standard enough for other 
applications to use.  This sucks. (Those of you who previously 
volunteered can expect an email soon, I haven't wanted to ask before 
the code was better organized).

So that's the update ... Looking forward not letting the rest of the 
summer get away ...


Greg Elin
greg@fotonotes.net
917-304-3488
865-342-9048 fax

http://fotonotes.net - "Because photos have stories.(tm)"
blog: http://dublog.com - "Articulate the obvious."

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Received on Monday, 5 July 2004 10:15:30 UTC