[w3photo] Notes from photo annotation devday sessions, WWW2004

Photography markup Developers Day session at WWW2004
NYC, 2004-05-22
Chair: Greg Elin

Participants:
  Patrizia Andronico <patrizia.andronico@iit.cnr.it>
  Peter Barna <p.barna@tue.nl>
  Bryce Benton <himself@brycebenton.us>
  Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
  Timothy Falconer <timothy@immuexa.com>
  Nick Gibbins <nmg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
  Siegfried Handschuh <handschuh@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de>
  Steve Harris <swh@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
  Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
  Richard Lee <rlee@apotex.com>
  Libby Miller <libby.miller@bristol.ac.uk>
  Mor Naarman

-----

Introduction
Greg Elin

- digital photography has outgrown conventional photgraphy
- pixel manipulation mature compared to 'story manipulation'
- non-pictorial information space
- infrastructure mature (image formats, wireless networking, affordable digital
cameras, blogs, etc)
- camera phone as key platform

Some examples:
- w3photo.org
  - semantic web technology-based

- harlem.org
  - archive of portrais of jazz musicians
  - uses photo annotations as tour of information space

-----

Image Annotation as a Semantic Web Application
Libby Miller <libby.miller@bristol.ac.uk>

Where it started...
- depiction as specific type of image annotation
- grown from FOAF work
- person or thing is depicted in a photo - creates links between thingsa which
are depicted by the same images
- (shows codepiction path application - URL?)
- not just depiction, also identification
  - SVG outlines to identify image regions
  - depiction of things other than people (WOrdNet terms)
- SWAD-E workshop in june 2002 (URL?)

create a new vocabulary for image description
- draws on existing work
- mixes existing vocabularies
- community effort

RDF vocabularies used:
- Creative Commons
  - image and metadata licensing
  - licensing critical to reuse
  - some modification of existing vocabulary (date of birth not used)
- Dublin Core
  - bibliographic metadata
  - textual description of image (dc:description)
- Annotea
  - annotation vocabulary
  - linking RDF annotation to the annotated image, some biblio metadata
- Image regions
  - rectilinear regions, region depiction
- Conference ontology
  - conference as epicted event, links with iCal RDF vocabulary
- FOAF
  - identifying people throughout

Important/tricky areas

- identification of people and events (which don't have URIs) by key properties
  - some others disagree ;)

- expressing location is difficult, was left out (implicit location at conference)

- annotation properties - merging graphs loses information (origins of annotations)

- reuse vs. creation of vocabularies. OWL capabilities (class/property equivalence)
  difficult, most developers are only using RDF(S) tools

- validation
  - required fields for descriptions
  - must have identifier for people

- legal issues
  - some countries (France, eg) person owns photographs of them

Demos:
- masahido's annotator - http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/sw/img-annotator.html
- libby's annotator -
http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2004/03/w3photo/annotate.html
  - lookups from text labels to resources

-----

AKTive Photo
Steve Harris <swh@ecs.soton.ac.uk>

- explorer interface to phot0 annotations
  - photo.aktivespace.org
- AKTive Spaces, from mc schraefel's mSpace work
  - previous Semantic Web application CS AKTive Space - cs.aktivespace.org
- AKTive Photo code is available under GPL

-----

Mor Naarman


- twofold value of photo annotation - personal vs. social
- social benefit through implicit sharing of information
- geographical location used to share labels between annotations
  - different photos of same location may have similar labels
  - ranking for suitable labels
- stanford campus experiment to gathr annotations (cameras and GPSs to visitors)
- general terms more common, 'float up'
  - IDF for ranking terms

-----

Further demonstrations and comments
Greg Elin

Ron and Taylor's Road Trip - rzweb.com/roadtrip/
- GPS-located images, along with TerraServer satellite imagery tiles

Yafro - yafro.com
- MoBlog site
- example of threaded discussion attached to image of armed iraqis, taken by a
soldier

Flickr - flickr.com
- flash application, simple photo sharing, connected chat

The ESP Game - espgame.org
- competitive photo labelling, scores for getting th same labels as other people

--

Critical concepts for developers (greg's slides - didn't manage to capture all
of this)

why rectangular image regions (as opposed to SVG outlines)?
- similarity with existing (rectangular) images

Legal issues
(scribe had difficulty getting all of this down)

Greg Elin: is permission required for publishing annotated images?

Jim Hendler: approval and notification is a barrier to scalability

Karl Dubost: cultural issues - assumption that permission is not required
  is not universal

Jim Hendler: default should be opt-in (on notification), not opt-out
  (or, opt-out on automatic permission)

Tim Falconer: privacy issues involved

Jim Hendler: predominant view (from survey?) is that most people are
  happy for photos to appear, but want the ability to remove those photos
  that they don't want

-----

Tidepool
Tim Falconer

- image annotation for people that don't use folders in their email
- no difficult semantic concepts - who/what/where/when
- drag and drop of tags (annotations) from these four categories onto images
- help users to handle complexity of tags (large numbers)
  - graph visualisation of tags?
  - (JH: Ben Schneiderman says his studies show that people don't like
    graph interfaces for large datasets)

-----

Jim Hendler
- presentation of SW information is as important as annotation
  - generic SW portals (mindswap.org)
  - domain-specific portals swint.mindswap.org

-----

Summary of participants' interests

- most participants were interested in photo annotation because
  a) it was a nifty SW application and b) it addressed a need
- some extra points raised

Steve Harris: two main barriers to entry: rdf model, and rdf syntax
- need is for task-specific APIsfor generating rdf/xml

Karl (dubost?): rdf should be invisible to users and developers

Nick Gibbins: image annotations as requirement for ontology-based open
  hypermedia - navigable links between image regions based on SW relations
  and depicted things

Libby Miller: real value from SVG1.2 (Dean jackson and Jim Ley)

Bryce Benton: spectrum of access rights, from public to private
  batch processing would also be a benefit

Mor Naarman: audio annotations (audio labels), storytelling (HP), geo/time
reference annotations

-----

The next step?

- SWAD-E workshop (contact Libby


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Received on Saturday, 22 May 2004 13:09:08 UTC