Photos and FOAF
Thanks to the folks over on #foaf, and Libby Miller for the initial prodding, I’ve been toying around with codepiction annotation on some photos. After I got past some initial misunderstandings, the markup became rather trivial, so I hope to get more annotation done soon (along with moving this site to the new server and restoring the photos).
The paths demo is apparently broken at the moment, but you can query the codepiction database with email address of the samo fools and see images from the recent (August) wedding. I’m not going to post other people’s email addresses, and the query page unfortunately doesn’t take an mbox_sha1 argument in place of an email (mbox) argument, so if you know the addresses have at it, otherwise, just look at the photos of me.
So now I’ve got a thought. TypePad is cool. TypePad photo albums are cool. As is the idea of auto-generated FOAF files. It seems like it would take very little to add a feature to TypePad that would allow annotating photos with assertions such as “Person A (who happens to be in my Blogroll/FOAF file) is depicted in this photo.” This annotation, then, could be linked to the user’s FOAF file and all of a sudden you have a critical mass of codepiction data. (Let it be said that I know almost nothing about TypePad’s use/generation of FOAF, if this feature is already present in TypePad, or if Six Apart is already considering something like this. I just thought it would be a good fit.)
Comments
I finally got the paths demo working:
http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2002/02/paths/
You can use it with mbox or mbox sha1sums. It updates once a day from the codepiction database:
http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2001/08/codepict/ http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/rweb/addurl
let me know if you run into any problems.
Posted by: libby on October 20th, 2003 9:46 AMCool! Thanks for your work on the paths demo.
Posted by: kasei on October 22nd, 2003 10:45 AM
Ok, I fixed the codepiction search so you can search by mbox_sha1sum (in fact that’s what it does under the hood anyway).
I’m still working on the paths thing. The issue is that moving from postgres to mysql has slowed down queries with no identifier, e.g. all pictures with all their names and mboxes. I’m trying to fix this but I’m not an expert on building indexes. More information is here about the paths demo: http://rdfweb.org/people/damian/2002/02/foafnation/, http://rdfweb.org/2002/01/photo/.
Critical mass would indeed be excellent. The key thing is probably how to easily identify people in the photos. This has proved the most annoying aspect of catalogiung photos for me (and prompted me to write a tool which allows you to plug in a restful RDF webservice from a data source to help you find people - could be an addressbook or a harvested datasource).
I’m supposed to write something on codepiction for rdfweb.org soon…
Posted by: libby on October 16th, 2003 1:38 AM