BPOC Express: Shared Digital Asset Management in a private cloud in under 6 months | Balboa Park

BPOC Express: Shared Digital Asset Management in a private cloud in under 6 months.

Check out the great work Balboa Park in San Diego has done in developing a collaborative DAM in this write up which they did.


BPOC Express: Shared Digital Asset Management in a private cloud in under 6 months | Balboa Park:
Overview

A New Image Site - Ookaboo

Recently I was contacted  by a Paul Houle about some broken links on the site Dig-mar.com which I maintain. I guess I might as well announce here that that site is no longer being maintained and will be closed completely this summer. I am focusing my energies on this blog and the Imageminders.net site of the ICCoop.. However, I am grateful to Paul for his reminder and would like to pass on the resource which he was attempting to post on that site. Ookaboo

His group  Ontology2, has created the Ookaboo website, which contains digital images that they claim  are either in the public domain and or under Creative Commons licensing terms. It appears to be a collection of harvested images from the web, in particular Wikimedia, where people place images that they wish to share with the world, so the free access is probably correct. 
The interesting part to me, and I think to many of you,  is how they are indexing the images , which is by means of the semantic web. 
Here is their description of what that means.

Images on Ookaboo are indexed by terms from the semantic web, the web of linked data. Although you're free to find images through the human interface, automated systems can quickly find and use images through the semantic API.
Ookaboo has two goals: (i) to dramatically improve the state of the art in image search for both humans and machines, and (ii) to construct a knowledge base about the world that people live in that can be used to help information systems better understand us.

Semantic Web, Linked Data
In the semantic web, we replace the imprecise words that we use everyday with precise terms defined by URLs. This is linked data because it creates a universal shared vocabulary.
For an example, in conventional image search, a person might use the word "jaguar" to search for
    •    the animal
    •    the automobile brand
    •    the Jacksonville Jaguars (NFL team)
    •    the game console from Atari
    •    ... and nearly 30 other things that are listed in Wikipedia.
Note in the cases above, there are pages in Wikipedia about each of the topics above: it's reasonable, therefore, that we could use these URLs as a shared vocabulary for referring to these things. However, we get some benefits when we use URLs that are linked to machine-readable pages, such as http://dbpedia.org/resource/Jaguar, or 
http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/biology.itis.180593

Pages on Ookaboo are marked up with RDFa, a standard that lets semantic web tools extract machine readable information from the same pages that people view.

Named entities
Ookaboo is oriented around named entities, particularly 'concrete' things such as places, people and creative works. With current technology, it's more practical to create a taxonomy of things like "Manhattan", "Isaac Asimov" and "The Catcher In the Rye" than it is to tackle topics like "eating", "digestion" and "love". We believe that a comprehensive exploration of named entities will open pathways to an understanding of other terms, and hope to extend Ookaboo's capabilities as technology advances.

The above information is from their About us page, which I highly recommend you check out.

Oh and yes their images are pretty good too, especially for those interested in buildings. and other "concrete" things.

How to Quantify unauthorized use

There have been some interesting posts on the Museum Computer Network list serve regarding a recent report from the GAO to Congressional Committees entitled

"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods"
Here is a working URL:  http://tinyurl.com/piracyreport

Jeff Sedlik, photographer, points out that without being able to quantify the amount of content piracy, which the report indicates is not possible, it is hard to estimate the economic effect.  He then goes on to describe how an Image Recognition technology does seem to be able to quantify the use without attribution or permission of still images.

"I can't speak to piracy in other content arenas, but with respect to photography, advances in technology now allow image piracy rates on the internet to be quantified to an extent sufficient to estimate piracy rates with some accuracy. Image recognition technology may be used to locate instances of known images on web sites, and license data may then be used to determine whether or not each instance is authorized. Not all sites can be sampled, nor can all every instance of every image be identified, but it is possible to quantify estimated piracy rates via representative sampling.

In  2003, PicScout http://www.picscout.com/ (an Israeli image recognition company) searched commercial web sites for instances of images of known ownership. Nine out of every ten published images were found to be used without permission or knowledge of the rights holders.

In 2005, PicScout used a new reference group of 20,000 sample images (on this occasion, provided by a group of stock photographers), and found that 1 out of every 17 copies of these images published on commercial web sites was published without the knowledge or permission of the rights holder.  In the USA, the rate of misuse found in this survey was 64%. In Germany, 23%. In the UK, 13%.

PicScout reports that over a seven year period, it found that 85% of images found on commercial websites were published without the knowledge or permission of the rights holders.

In a recent LA Times article (Sept 9, 2009), Gettyimages reported that it identifies approximately 42,000 examples of copyright infringement per year, while Corbis reported the identification of approximately 70,000 infringements each year. Importantly, these figures represent only the infringements that have been detected. It is reasonable to assume that these figures represent a small fraction of actual unauthorized usages.

I am not writing to encourage or suggest heightened enforcement or penalties for piracy, nor am I expressing an opinion on copyright law, website spidering or digital rights management. I am merely pointing out that the report in question does not indicate that piracy rates are lower than estimated by industry, and that in the photography content industry, technology now allows some quantification of piracy rates. Perfect.   I would not disagree with an opinion that the content industry has used piracy statistics in lobbying for support from legislators.  But any attempt to claim that the figures are overstated will be frustrated by the very same issue identified in the report -- such claims cannot be quantified."

Jeff Sedlick
Check out the GAO report for yourself. - http://tinyurl.com/piracyreport

A New Reality

After reading several reviews and seeing an acerbic interview with its author recently on “The Colbert Report,” I have been thinking about the new book “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” by David Shields and its implications for intellectual property rights in our digital society. Shield’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers, which the author has taken out of context (in some cases, even “revised, at least a little”), and for which he only acknowledges the sources in an appendix, added reluctantly at his publisher’s lawyers’ insistence. Shield’s scorns and is “bored by out-and-out-fabrication” and creativity, and interested in “reality-based art” based on “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Shield’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become so prominent in our Internet culture. Even the teaching of visual culture has seen the erosion of the value of intellectual property rights with the ubiquity and ease of finding images of artists’ works with on the Web with the click of a button. With the closure or lack of development of local institutional image collections, many teaching faculty and students are left to forage the Web for images without thought to who produced the art or photographed the object. That digital media are remolding our social landscape, especially arts and entertainment, goes without saying. That they are certainly affecting the methodology of scholarship and research needs is also sadly evident.

It is incumbent on us as part of our consultancy with individuals and institutions over the preservation and digital conversion of image collections not to forget the moral obligation we have to honor intellectual property rights where appropriate. Ignorance is certainly bliss among some faculty I have known, who often ignore basic tenets of copyright (although I suspect that they may be more informed than they let on). Along with technical, preservation, access and metadata issues, we need to educate our clients in the basics of copyright law and tenets of fair use with regard to images. Fortunately, there are very good forums and sites where we can direct faculty and institutions to get the most up-to-date and authoritative information about copyright, especially since major developments and legal decisions affecting academia are occurring with some frequency lately.

The value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is being increasingly questioned in our digital world. So we need to be vigilant where we are able, especially in academic and library settings, as we go about our evangelizing for wider digital access to the fruits of generations of visual artists. Intellectual property rights should also be a “reality” to us, even if the author David Shields would probably disagree. (By the way, I’ve decided that he may be an uncreative minor wacko.)