We have done contacts, and after that photos are the next core type of social networking data
When people come from say G+ or other SN then pictures is a major component of what they bring.
Many people really need to sort out years of family photo library archives which have been entrusted to Apple or Flickr but for longevity must be open source and standard and solid.
When I have given talks about Solid I have often given an example that you should be able to put together a slideshow using photos from your own archives, from all the things fiends have given you access to, from all the materials you have at work, and all the free stuff on CC archives. So solid has a great opportunity to deliver huge value. Photos could be a great example of how solid breaks down silos.
For many folks out there music collections are no longer really a thing because of streaming, but photos actually have massive sentimental value.
So we should look at footprint designs quite like contacts but for photos, and classes for photo library (or which a person may have access to many). We chatted with schema.org folks about classesâŚ
(Note that the data-browser already does the bare minimum: if you have folder with some images in it it will offer you a slide show view.)
You probably already know this, Tim, but for a long time, Google+ was a haven for professional photographers. Once Google Photos was stripped out of Google+, that momentum died but there are still quite a few photographers there. Solving this problem will be critical to even a minimum viable product for those folks. Glad you are thinking about this.
BTW, I just recently downloaded several years of my Google+ (since the beginning in 2011) and Iâm guessing that it is around 8 gig (I havenât unzipped it all yet). So we are talking about fairly hefty data allotments for individual users coming over.
That longevity promise is even more important as a selling point, I think. So many people lose their accounts or their social network hosts just close down (like Myspace and Vine for a more recent example). I canât begin to count how much of my personal data like photos I have lost control over.
Having a place that can store your photos outside of your laptop (that will eventually get old and be thrown out or suffer unexpected disk problems) and outside of a particular centralized server that can go out of business or sell off your data, I think, is very attractive to regular users. Even to an older userbase.
Some of you may have experimented or played with ImageSnippets. I created ImageSnippets (ImageSnippets for managing photo collections with linked data. It imports from Flickr albums and can also use links to images (i.e. you donât have to upload to our server to add the metadata). You can build triple tags for image descriptions using a small ontology for relating the normal âkeywordâ to the image. I created this lightweight ontology with Pat Hayes. From the IS interface (I prefer to think of it as a view), you can share or publish the images with the RDFa and JSON-LD. You can also use it to use images for ontology engineering. I am just now (today) creating a Solid pod and beginning to experiment to see how we could use our IS data and interface (designed for novices) with Solid.
As an example â here is a link to a photo from years ago (2006) http://imgsnp.co/zaxra - made by Pat HayesâŚof me listening to TimBl describe FOAF to Tom Gruber. As I recall â as I recall, TimBl - you said I could stand there for Pat to make my photo if I had a FOAF ID. I donât think you expected I would say yes â but I did! LOL ----
when you click on the link to see the photo, you can click on the photo to flip it and show the metadata - including a link to view the triples (soon to be live linked); view the source of this file to see the RDFa.
A few things to clarify about ImageSnippets and Solid.
ImageSnippets:
Allows you to describe and pretty much build a discussion Web around imagery using RDF sentences expressed in RDFa notation
RDFa collection is basically a structured data island in an HTML doc thatâs generated and published using ImageSnippets
What Solid Offers
Authentication Library that provides an API for adding an enhanced âLoginâ feature to Image Snippets
âNew Save Asâ functionality for saving RDF sentences to a personal pod (or Data Space)
Benefits
By saving to a Solid-compliant content creators acquire full control over their Image Annotations and aspects of Discussion Webs that are grounded in their pods i.e., additional RDF sentences saved to documents in a given pod
Content creators can monetize access if they choose via combination of ACLs and expiring
X.509 certs (as the ticketing mechanism).
Screenshot Demonstration using our OSDS Browser Extension (which supports both solid-auth and âsave asâ feature that I described earlier in this post):
/cc @timbl (I demonstrated this to both Margaret Warren [zeroexp] and Pat Hayes during very fruitful session about the combined potential of Solid and ImageSnippets as tools for simplifying RDF appreciation and utility exploitation.)
Kingsley, This seems very promising indeed. Since our demo, I have been thinking about some tighter integration using the login API which would be quite simple. Actually - what I want to try next though is to add image URLâs from the solid pod - adding the linked data markup via the IS interface and then resaving the Turtle back to the solid pod.
â but I did! LOL ----
