CodeCon 2005 Submission

Photospace

http://photospace.sourceforge.net

Photospace is an open platform for searching, viewing and annotating digital media in time and space.

Presented by Alon Salant

Alon is an owner of Carbon Five, http://www.carbonfive.com, Java programmer and budding geohacker. He has presented a number of times at JavaOne on Enterprise Java topics, written for O'Reilly's OnJava and contributed the Java chapter for O'Reilly's Flash Remoting the Definitive Guide.

Project History

Photospace has its origins in yet another homegrown digital photo management tool that started bursting at the seams with just too many photographs.

The goal of the project is to make a large set of digital media as useful as possible while minimizing the effort required to add media and meaning to the system.

Core principals:

• Use implicit meta data as much as possible with a focus on time and place
• Provide fast, powerful searching for a large media archive
• Provide an open set of services to enable easy integration with other applications
• Use filesystem-based organization and management of photo/media files

The result:

• A web application for searching, viewing, managing digital media
• Lucene-backed search engine with custom support for geospatial queries
• Hooks in to searching and serving media through SOAP-based web services, RSS, RESTful RDF, Flash Remoting
• Media file management through WebDAV, local filesystem, LAN fileshares, ftp/scp, or web application

Photospace has been inspired by Thingster, Flickr, Gmail, PhotoRDF and discussion on the geowanking mailing list among others.

Project Demo

Photospace addresses three current topics in software development.

First is the interaction between software and real objects in time and space. Geocoding and mapping are core elements of this topic. Second is the semantic web and interoperating applications. Web services and RDF are core elements of this topic. Third is finding and using implicit meta data in large systems.

This presentation is of the Photospace software project in the context of these topics. Examples include using Photospace-managed photography in external applications and writing JSP, PHP, .Net or Flash clients to Photospace services.

Presentation structure:

• Geocoding digital photography, tools and techniques
• RDF/RSS and the semantic web
• Implicit meta data in digital photography
• The core Photospace searching service
• Mapping examples and approaches to mapping

Example: Spatial search results on a Terraserver image in RDFMapper.

http://photospace.org/personal/web/search?query=point:38,-122.5+radius:3
A search for all media within 3km of 38°N,122.5°W, China Camp State Park, CA.

http://photospace.org/personal/web/search?query=point:38,-122.5+radius:3&view=rss
The RSS view of these search results.

http://tinyurl.com/5myq4
These search results plotted on a Terraserver aerial photograph of China Camp using MapBureau's RDFMapper service.

http://photospace.org/personal/web/search?query=point:38,-122.5+radius:3&view=map
These search results plotted on a TIGER Map Server map.

Future Plans

• Mobile phone photography and photoblogging
• Include view counts as implicit meta data
• GPS/GPX track log integration
• Improved mapping
• Integration with Thingster, Flickr, Ofoto
• Support for audio and video
• Development and support of applications that use Photospace services