Liam Wyatt wrote:
Dear All,
[cross post to commons-l and wikimediaaustralia-l]
Picture Australia is interested in adding Commons photos to their
service but has several technical issues they would like to resolve
first. Can we help?
Picture Australia is an archive aggregation service run by the National
Library of Australia and aggregates searches across many Australian
institutions (such as the various state libraries, universities,
government departments) and also Flickr. You can see the project at
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/index.html and you can see their other
contributors at
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/contribute/participants/index.html
Great!
This is a quote from the email written to me from PA:
At the moment our main source of contemporary images is Flickr and we
are interested in investigating other sources of contemporary images.
There are a few issues with the Wikimedia Commons that we foresee:
1- the metadata quality is highly variable. With Flickr contributors
are able to provide a fair bit of additional metadata about their
images. Before pulling images in from Wikipedia we'd need the data to
adhere to some basic standards. (see
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/contribute/metadata.html).
That would mean adding Dublin Core metadata. A good target by itself.
Perhaps a task for a toolserver app?
2- there are certainly a number of images that have
been sourced from
Picture Australia or our contributors. Pulling these in would create an
issue with duplicate images and would likely confuse users if they were
attempting to buy a copy.
They shouldn't have problems in keeping a hash of each image they store
to avoid duplicates. We can't guess
3- Wikipedia doesn't have an OAI interface so we
would need to look at
how to ingest the data.
Use the API?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&gene…
I would add a 4th concern, and I'm not sure if
this is a big problem or
easily fixed, is that most of the pictures on Commons are not relevant
to PA. Would we be able to provide a feed of only the relevant categories?
All the best,
- Liam Wyatt
We could, but we shouldn't guess what they really want.
My concern:
What about images we have to delete?
Does it support easy removing from their index?