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Subject: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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  • From: aaron <amw5t AT virginia.edu>
  • To: cc-metadata AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: hi and project question
  • Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:16:12 -0500

Hi there people,
I'm new to this list so please be gentle if I am about to massively violate some protocol or other.

The other day I took a digital photo of a bowl of pho for the fine people of pho king (http://www.hewnandhammered.com/pho/) and I realized that I didn't know of an easy way to embed licensing information into that jpeg which could easily be read by future users. I did some research and found a CC tool that looks like it operates on mp3 files, a reference to adding metadata to jpegs for an online photo service, and the "using markups" page (http://creativecommons.org/technology/usingmarkup). I didn't see what I wanted to create, so I thought I'd pitch it here to see what you thought.

First, I only have a Mac. But second, what I'm about to describe although implemented w/ Mac APIs does not break the cross-platform nature of the relevant embedded metadata.

Ok, so Macos X has this feature called "Services." What you can do with a service is register certain data types that your service understands how to do certain things with. For instance, I am running mail.app right now. When I select a block of text in this email and go to Mail->Services, various services that know how to deal with selected text present themselves at my beck and call. I'd like to implement a service that, at first, registers the jpeg file format and knows how to find, extract, and visualize CC metadata. This way anyone who installs my service can check out CC licensing information for any jpeg (or any data type that gets implemented in the service .. I am using jpeg as the starting point only here) whether or not the home user is using Adobe Photoshop, GraphicConverter, or any arbitrary program dealing with jpegs. And they can do it conveniently from within whatever application they are running.
So, the Service metaphor both integrates the CC licensing functionality with other applications, making it convenient and intuitive, while freeing the user from caring whether or not the developers of the relevant application have ever heard of CC licensing, making it bitchin'. This way anyone checking out my CC license embedded jpeg on a mac using application Foo could go to Foo->Services->CCLicenseInfo and up would pop the right stuff.

Also, I'd like to make a drag and drop application that embeds CC information in known file formats, beginning with jpeg.

About a week before my finals began I realized I thought this would be cool, so no real work has been done. However, 3 weeks ago I would have hacked out C code to embed the metadata. Since then I've learned about a much easier, cooler, and wicked extensible way to implement this stuff on the Mac -- the forthcoming Spotlight. (http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html) Spotlight already understands the metadata fields for, among other formats:

▪ JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF images
▪ MP3 and AAC audio files
▪ QuickTime movies
▪ PDF files
▪ Microsoft Word and Excel documents
▪ iChat transcripts
▪ Email messages
▪ Address Book contacts
▪ iCal calendar files

That means that all the programmer needs to know is what metadata field for each file format contains the CC licensing information (and if this field could have other information too then how to search for the beginning of the CC metadata block). So, although it means sacrificing the opportunity to write some nitty-gritty C code (i am a programmer turned law student and miss C), it seems to me Spotlight is a massive boon in that it frees the programmer in my situation from figuring out the individual data file formats beyond the level of "where should the CC metadata go."

Anyway, that's my idea. A Service which uses the Spotlight APIs, registers various file formats for CC licensing extraction and a drag and drop embed/extract mechanism, both implemented with the super-convenient Spotlight APIs. After the first file format or two works, using Spotlight it should be mostly trivial to add others, and for each added file type licensing visualization is automatically available across the board of mac apps dealing with that type since we're a service.

Again, although Services and Spotlight are MacOs technologies, the actual metadata will remain pure for other platforms -- this is just a convenient model for extracting, inserting, and viewing that metadata.

So, here are my first questions --
1) is there anybody out there?
2) do you think this is an ok idea?
3) what suggestions/comments do you have?
4) where can I find technical information on the XMP/RDF, etc and exactly how it's generated and interpreted? Is there a library already implemented for this?
5) has CC figured out where they want license info embedded for JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF?
6) is there already code to, for instance, generate a pretty picture for, eg, <prohibits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse"; />?
7) other stuff I haven't thought of yet.

thanks for the time,
aaron
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amw AT mac.com 9BE3 44C4 B7E8 4230 D8CD B024 E0C1 C289 914B 3BC8
amw5t AT virginia.edu 6E62 9045 C1AE 4503 7671 C307 6EF9 1600 BCEA 1B87




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