[GMG-Devel] Metadata in MediaGoblin

[Jonas Öberg]

Greetings,

I'm a previous employee of Creative Commons (where I worked at the
same time as cwebber) and since March this year I'm working with the
Shuttleworth Foundation on the concept of embedded metadata for
digital works. Essentially trying to bring order to how people embed
license information in EXIF tags and similar structures.

You can watch our introductory video here:

http://vimeopro.com/user18151220/commons-machinery/video/65553018

(yes, it should probably be Mediagoblin-hosted instead :-)

We would like to build a prototype around this with Mediagoblin. We've
hacked Inkscape to have somewhat better support and UI for license
metadata, and we'll be building a plugin to Firefox that places
license metadata on the clip board when someone copies an image from a
web page, something that can then be picked up by Inkscape.

What we'd love to do is to create a "full cycle re-use" scenario,
involving Mediagoblin, Firefox and Inkscape. The story goes something
like this:

1. An svg is uploaded to a Mediagoblin instance.
2. A user uses Firefox (with an add-on to copy metadata) to browse the
Mediagoblin instance
3. The user selects one or more illustrations that the user wants to
re-use or re-purpose
4. The user uses the new function “copy Image with metadata” (pending
native support in the “copy Image” code) in Firefox and paste in
Inkscape to copy one or more illustrations.
5. The user makes modifications to the illustrations, optionally
changing the metadata
6. The user uploads the finished work to Mediagoblin as a new illustration

What we want should happen:

When the original illustrator uploads the illustration, Mediagoblin
checks and displays the correct licensing and attribution information
according to the metadata embedded in the illustration.

This metadata is retained through copy/paste in Firefox and when the
user uploads a changed illustration, Mediagoblin attributes both
creators correctly and gives accurate licensing information in both
text and embedded RDFa as well as making a link to the original image.

Please note that this is not meant to be a finished product! We want
to create this with Mediagoblin to show what could be done if support
was in the tools we use.

I'll be digging into Mediagoblin within the next couple of weeks to
get a better understanding for where in Mediagoblin such support
should go and how it's best implemented. Any thoughts on this in the
mean time is obviously well appreciated :-)


Sincerely,
Jonas