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Geographical Tagging of Resources

Acronym

GeoT

Duration

December 2011 – July 2012

Summary

This project, funded under the auspices of the JISC 13/11 Discovery work programme, forms one work strand in wider EDINA efforts to address a number of the key problem areas identified by the Resource Discovery Taskforce and the Discovery programme, specifically: services that support the creation and enhancement of metadata, enhancements to existing aggregations, and services that support more effective reuse of metadata. This activity, 'GeoT' , concentrates on the development of a web service, based on open source software, to extract metadata from and embed new metadata in multimedia content, with a particular focus on geo- tagging of resources.

GeoT will wrap existing open source software for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, and video metadata, into a web service. The mature open source metadata manipulation tool, ExifTool, will provide the core capabilities for providing a generic web client that will allow users to upload multimedia files. These files will then be mined for their intrinsic metadata content and that content exposed for editing, enhancement and export. Whilst focusing on the geo-tagging (adding external tags outside a photo to provide location information) and geo-coding (embedding geographic location information within a resource e.g. in the EXIF metadata) metadata components, the tool will also provide a wealth of additional metadata about the uploaded resource which can in itself be used for richer discovery purposes e.g. camera make/model information, encoding, compression info (which can be important in determining if specific software can handle the resource).

EDINA fully supports the Resource Discovery Taskforce vision, being already a signatory to the Discovery Open Metadata Principles, and having contributed to phase 1 of the Discovery programme through release of OpenURL activity data (and provided an example of how the data might be used), and the GOLD project.

Project Deliverables

  • A basic web service based around ExifTool, suitable for 3rd party use to geo-tag/geo-code image, audio, and video metadata
  • A web client enabling user upload, metadata parsing (from resource) and metadata enrichment (map based geo-tagging/geo-coding)
  • An Open meadata corpus of geo-tagged/geo-coded enriched records with a REST based query interface

EDINA Contacts

James Reid

Partnerships

JISC Discovery strand - discovery.ac.uk

Funders

JISC