Magnus Manske wrote:
Can do. How about img_metadata, with XML? We could add
more EXIF data or
other metadata about the image there. Or would that be too slow to parse?
I lean towards serialized PHP objects or arrays for this kind of
storage, but you can suit yourself. XML is good for exchanging data
across a variety of systems, an application which has never excited me
very much.
Another way would be to keep it as it is, and add a
special mode to
ImagePage.php, which would return the EXIF table in plain text; that
could be read in by the "calling" wikipedia.
Now that I think of it: Why not include the EXIF data in the
Special:Export XML for the image description page? That way, we could
display EXIF data, image comment, (last) author of the description page
etc. in the "calling" wikipedia, which is a wanted feature anyway.
The problem with using Special:Export or action=raw for this purpose is
that the wikitext in the description page must be parsed in the context
of the commons wiki. Templates must be available and namespaces must be
correct. My idea for addressing this is to introduce an action=render
which outputs an HTML fragment suitable for incorporation into the
parser output. This would also be handy for interwiki transclusion,
although it would restrict the feature to trusted sites for security
reasons.
The current plan for transmitting commons metadata is to use MySQL to
replicate the data to a local slave DB. This allows the apache to serve
requests without waiting for a 100-200ms propagation delay.
-- Tim Starling