Great Shot - Where'd You Take That?
Stewart Butterfield,
Flickr,
Aug 29, 2006
Flickr has added (finally) geotagging to its photo metadata, which means that photographers can place their photos on a map. This article describes the process. I tested the system and geotagged my photos from Halifax - here is one of the photos, and you can see the geotag information in small print on the right side ("Taken in Halifax, Nova Scotia (map)"). What is interesting to me is how this sort of metadata specification is being developed - not all at once, handed down as though a Bible from a body of experts, but iteratively, one item at a time, after a lot of experimentation and commenting about it. I would say that more people, and more time, was involved in developing this one item of metadata than was involved in the whole first version of the IMS protocols. And if you try it, you will see some of the results of this - like the location privacy setting! Also - note how, when the protocol was introduced, phtographers also got an easy tool for creating such metadata. We're still waiting for something like that for learning object metadata. It is examples like this (and I have seen many of them through my years of involvement of RSS) that lead to my criticisms of the process, and the result, of the formal standards process (not only IMS, but also IEEE, ISO, and the like) as it applies to metadata. Via Stuart Yeates, Tim Lauer and Ewan McIntosh.
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