Machine Tags / Discuss

VRC Jeremy says:

At Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR, we're at the very early stages of trying to use Flickr (and primarily machine tagging) to create a collection of contemporary ceramics images for educational use. Traditional academic image collections are closed data silos, so we're hoping to create something that's more open, uses a distributed submission process, and uses the field-value relationships that machine tags offer. Creative commons licenses for images will help in making it more available to anyone. Our current site is a cataloging interface that creates machine tags, and our real collection site is in development.

We sort of arbitrarily picked the namespace 'ceramics' (with all the talk about documentation/standardization on this discussion list, I know this is bad...sorry). Currently we're also using the model of having our ceramics instructors invite certain artist to join our flickr group, with the hope that they will contribute content. It's early, but so far the success rate has been really low. Nonetheless, we're trying to get the word out about this project to others in the library technology field with the hope that they'll embark on similar/better projects. We just gave a brief presentation on this at the 2008 code4lib conference, and it seemed that hardly anyone knew about machine tags...though they were knee deep in things like RDF. Anyway, we're hoping to spur on a new subgroup of machine tag users, since it should have a use within libraries and academia.
Posted at 3:54PM, 1 March 2008 PDT ( permalink )