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Cooperative Cataloging: from music to location

I remember when CDDB came out. It was great, even if a bit empty, and it simply felt good to find a CD that hadn’t been identified before and transcribe some data. (Note that one wasn’t ripping CDs at this point, just playing the CD in the SGI Irix box at the lab.*) At some point when i wasn’t paying attention, the cooperative community database seemed to became corporate as Gracenote. I’m not sure if there’s a lesson there or not. I suspect that in using licensed iTunes i’m passing some fee back to Gracenote, and that’s probably a good thing, because managing large union catalogs does take a great deal of resources. *cough, cough* The result of this build-up and development is that when a friend sent me an mp3 with just a title this morning, i was able to open it in iTunes and suddenly have all the metadata available to me. Networked reference databases and metadata rock, and in the (commercial) music world, it just happens.

I was reminded of that initial “wow” feeling of the CDDB (predating IMDB and newcomer NNDB) when reading about Andrew Turner’s Flickr Zone Tagr building on the Zone tag database (err, not ZTDB, thanks). Like TagMap this is another use of the flickr tags of geolocated (hence zone) photos. Andrew’s implementation has that same flavor as the early CDDB — cooperative cataloging of photos instead of CD tracks. Will i be able to take an emailed photo someday, view it, and have a background network query match buildings and skylines to a global 4D place model, extract a location and time range, pull on the descendant of the flickr zone tag database and get probable labels? “Oh, this was taken in Daytona in 1977 — that little one must be my cousin.”

Well, maybe not the 4D model part, maybe not the 1977 match, not for a while. But give us the cameras with the GPS coordinates embedded in the EXIF data….

* Never fear, scientists ask pay back for their time goofing off in the lab. Now that all the music CDs are labeled, you can start on labeling galaxies. No word on whether this project is meshing up with previously mentioned automatic astronomy photo metadata generator astrometry.net.

data entry, 4d cities, astronometry.net, astrometry.net, digital libraries, image models, spatial models,neogeography, geocoding, tagmap,flickr,data entry, authority files

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 4:08 pm and is filed under TunaBreath, digital libraries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Cooperative Cataloging: from music to location”

  1. Andrew Turner Says:
    July 23rd, 2007 at 5:59 pm

    Your “improbable future” is really just an “unintegrated reality”.

    Your 4D model with location & time is Microsoft’s Photosynth, your facial recognition is Polar Rose, and your genealogy (with possible facial recognition) is MyHeritage.

    Even better is to take that photo, and then have it overlaid on the reality around you (augmented reality) on your mobile to see what an area looked like in 1977, or 1942, or 1604.

    ok, so maybe it will take a couple of years – but you can see all the pieces are already here.

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