Semergence

Thanks to my horrible PHP skills, I can now generate some FOAF from Flickr profiles.

For example, here is some (very basic) FOAF for a Flickr Member.

Ironically, Flickr’s Service API can retrieve a user’s information, but almost nothing is in there. Plus, you can’t tell what groups a user is a member of, or what contacts a user has.

My end goal for this is to generate FOAF with name, nick, gender, location, groups, contacts, and photos. Then we’ll start on RDF for the photos themselves, including the tags a photo has.

Then we’ll scutter it all, and slap some ontologies down. Should be interesting!

Question is, how good are my screen scraping regex skills?

Flickr: Flickr Forums : FOAF, Please

Stewart, from Flickr, chimed in to the discussion on adding FOAF to Flickr’s pages. My response:

As for FOAF, I really want to explicitly set my FOAF file in my profile. I don’t want to add it into my description, because then finding it is more difficult. So, as you say, a text field where I can point to my FOAF would be perfect. Of course, if I don’t specify my FOAF, then Flickr would create a simple FOAF for me (just w/ name, nick, pointer to Flickr homepage, and sha1 of email addr).

Adding FOAF output of a Flickr user’s profile seems like a really easy thing to do. Then, we begin to use that to help with answering the “Who” part of queries.

Thanks Stewart!
Seth

crschmidt - Recent Entries

Chris Schmidt writes:

Send it in email - If you have a client which allows you to edit the email headers, you can include an email header X-FOAF: http://example.org/foaf.rdf that indicates the location of your FOAF file. Tools which understand incoming mail may be able to use this header to find information out about you, helpful for whitelisting and other purposes.

He lists other ways to get your FOAF out. Sounds like a good idea, especially for mailing lists that archive the emails.

What if anyone could assign tags to photos in Flickr? Also, what if they can already and I just can’t find that feature?
How much of the metadata free-for-all would be "good" metadata? Where good is defined as useful. Is there such a thing as useless metadata? I argue there isn’t, as long as you know the context. For instance, if you know who (as in, FOAF) assigned the metadata (using the word tag from now on) then it doesn’t matter what the tag is. The whole point of the semantic web is to allow anyone to say anything about anything. Trust networks emerge, either implicit through certain algorithms, or explicit through group memberships. These trust networks allow weights to be associated to tags. Therefore, the same tag can be both useful and useless to different people.

Due to the use of URIs, external systems can be built to created these Tag free-for-alls. Flickr is very close to allowing URIs and RDF graphs between the page about the photo and the photo itself. Once that happens, and they start exposing the tags in the RDF about the photo, we are in a position to build the tag free-for-all.

The cost of generating metadata is very high. By distributing the workload across everyone who views the image, much much more metadata is generated.

I think the minimum step would be for Flickr to publish some RDF for the photo image itself, from the photo’s homepage. Once that is done, these external systems can be built.

I’ve been posting my ideas for more and better metadata over in FlickrIdeas Forum. Flickr is so ripe with metadata, I’m getting really excited about the possibilities we could do with it. I’m sure that by exposing the metadata as RDF (and formatted such that smushing is straightforward), the power of Flickr increases tremendously. At the very least, as new applications are built to take advantage of the new metadata (Show me all blog comments made in the blogosphere by authors who shoot on Nikon D70 and that have images on Flickr rated greater than a 3 out of 5 and tagged as ‘dog’.) more people will see the power of metadata and tags, and add more and more tags.

Anyway, stepping down from that soapbox, here’s the current roundup. Please post your ideas and followups!

• Explicit Link to Photo in Feed Entry - Provide an explicit link to the image itself, not the page about the image.
• FOAF, Please - Use FOAF, among other things, as the metadata for the author of forum posts, images, and image comments. Use foaf:mbox_sha1sum for easy identification.
• Nested Albums - I propose adding more meaning to tags, such as subtypes.
• Metadata for the Image Itself - Adding a <link> pointing towards RDF describing the image itself, especially its tags.

I’ve looked into Flickr, and it looks like a promising source for metadata.

It turns out they do a pretty good job to start. They expose feeds for photos tagged for "animal". They also expose a feed for each user.

Here’s where Flick need to go next:

• Add <link> to feed for tagged photos in the HTML. For instance, in http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/animal/.
• Add FOAF output when viewing a user’s page as a <link> in the HTML
• Add RDF <link> for each picture. Expose EXIF and tags for each picture. Add metadata for author, and even who has marked it as a Favorite.
• Stop using that awful Creative Commons RDF inside comments inside HTML. We’ve grown up, it’s time to use <link> to bind CC licenses to pictures. (Kudos for using CC in the first place!)
• Expose the CC license used in the picture RDF.

Flickr has a great opportunity for publishing a tremendous amount of metadata, generated quite easily. I’ve posted to their FlickrIdeas forum about Adding FOAF Export and Explicit URI to Image in Feed Entry. Post some comments there and let them know we want more metadata!

I mostly want to be able to browse to a picture, say, http://www.flickr.com/photos/gauviroo/1501146/, and be able to <link> to the RDF for that picture, including its tags, exif, and link to author’s FOAF.