I’ve been thinking of how we could use Flickr to publish our photos in a useful and interesting way. The ebiquity web site has, of course, it’s own facility, for uploading, storing and annotating photos (thanks Filip). But there are some advantages to using Flickr. Flickr is very popular so using it might increase our visibility and allow us to connect to more people. For example, searching Technorati for blog posts tagged with ‘pervasive computing’ shows the most recent public Flickr photos with that tag (if there were any!). Flickr also has some useful features like tags, notes, comments, groups, easy interface, etc. and is likely to continue to add innovations as the Web evolves.

Our Ebiquity photo site has some interesting, research oriented features like being able to add arbitrary annotations that are rendered and published as RDF. And, of course, we have complete control over it, allowing us to implement and experiment with new ideas for tagging, semantic web annotations, etc. It’s a valuable testbed, one that most people and groups don’t have.

So, can we have the best of both?

One idea is to use EBWEB as the primary source for our photos, but to add code to automatically upload new photos to the ebqiuity Flickr site. The code would also add appropriate titles, tags and comments and include in the comments a link to the OWL metadata. Flickr limits the HTML one can put in comments, so we can’t do anything fancy like embed rdf or use microformats.

But, maybe there are other ways we can use Flickr. If any ebsters (ebites?, ebiquiters?) want to play around with the ebiquity Flickr site, let me know and I’ll email you the site username and password.

Related posts: • ISWC photo group on Flickr;  • Flickr Rank;  • WIkiMedia meets the Semantic Web;  

Posted on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 11:11 am in categories [Blogging, Ebiquity, Semantic Web, Web]. Comments feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site. edit