Heya,
A quick note for metadata fans: since my last e-mail, the BHL has
released the first version of the BHL illustration schema for feedback
at
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/08/interested-in-improving-access-…
-- we'd love your feedback on what information you would like
associated with BHL illustrations which would make it easy for you to
find images you could use on Wikimedia projects, and then to reuse
those images on Wikimedia projects. Do we have adequate copyright
information, for instance? Please have a look at our schema and let us
know!
On 25 August 2012 00:08, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What sort of information are you looking for? The few
files I checked on
[[Category:Files from the Biodiversity Heritage Library]] (butterflies) seem
to be described in detail (mention in description + category for each
species), is this what you're aiming at?
Nemo: SO sorry for the late reply!
We're aiming for something like the
metadata on the following Commons images:
-
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greenwaxbill.jpg
-
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simonkai.jpg
-
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PasserMoabiticusWolf.jpg
(other examples available at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information_Art_of_Life/Gallery)
These images have textual descriptions in the {{Information Art of
Life}} template as well as corresponding categories to subjects; we
also use the {{inscription}} and {{Creator}} templates to provide more
information about what is actually in the image. The {{Creator}}
template automatically add the images to the appropriate creator
category.
Managing the information templates seems a nightmare,
perhaps you should aim
at categories.
I'm hopeful that eventually we'll be able to use software to
smoothen
this process: an {{Information Art of Life}} record would be
automatically generated from the basic metadata available at the BHL
when the image is uploaded to the Commons; a script could then
re-extract the metadata via the Mediawiki API or by reading hidden
"span" or "div" tags, for use in moving fully annotated images into
other image repositories, such as ArtStor. Until then, I hope the
Information Art of Life template will provide a way for Commons
editors to structure information about the illustration, especially as
pertains to biological species and other subjects.
One thing that would help would be for more templates which could help
categorize images. I recently wrote the {{Agent}} template (see
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Agent) which uses
{{#ifexists}} to test for a Creator template for the given creator
name. If the name exists, it incorporates it into the page, adding the
file to the correct creator category in the process. If the name
doesn't exist, it instead creates a red-link to where the Creator page
should be.
HotCat works well enough per se, but you still need to
know
the category guidelines (or better, the precise name of the category). It
would be great if the autocompletion could be fixed so that 1) you don't
need to know in advance whether the category you need is e.g. "Churches of
Finland" vs. "Finnish churches", 2) redirects and soft-redirects are
followed, e.g. from plural to singular and viceversa.
If such a feature existed, maybe even files uploaded with the UploadWizard
may at some point have categories.
That would be awesome to have! As something
completely unrelated to
everything else, has anybody worked on extracting the Commons
categories as a Web Ontology Language (OWL) file? It'll be interesting
to use OWL inferencing to "check" that categorized as organized
consistently, although it would be a *huge* project to work on.
cheers,
Gaurav
