VocabControl

I was very grateful to Sarah Saunders of Electric Lane for inviting me to speak at the CEPIC Conference at the IPTC Congress in May.

These are just a few of my personal highlights from a very full conference.

Image content for mobile devices

Dittmar Frohmann, Director of International Product at iStock and Getty Images, the keynote speaker of the day, covered a lot of ground, but I was struck by his recognition of the need for new business models for photo libraries. As has happened to the book publishing and music industries, the photo industries are reeling from the shock of the transition to a digital world.

Professional photographers are finding it harder to manage rights and licensing of their images, as digital copies are now so cheap and easy to produce and distribute around the world, and at the same time images taken on ubiquitous mobiles phones have become fashionable. “Citizen photographers”, including those taking out-of-focus badly lit mobile phone photos, are producing huge numbers of images that often do not meet traditional professional standards. However, such images are seen as “authentic” and “intimate” and have become popular with consumers in an age of austerity where slick, aspirational hyper-reality and glamorous models (Photoshop handsome?) are increasingly failing to chime with ordinary people.

This means that “un-professional” images are actively being sought by advertising agencies. Photographic styles go in and out of fashion, but never before has it been so easy for “amateurs” to produce high resolution images. At the same time, image libraries find themselves faced with a deluge of digital files and have to manage these files to ensure they don’t inadvertently breach rights agreements, while trying to add value to their services.

For image libraries, rights management and search/retrieval have become the two hottest topics as the key areas where economies of scale can offer improvements over “DIY” online sales and marketing. Libraries are effectively aggregators, and therefore services providers - gathering independent collections and individual photographers in one place can provide a one-stop shop for purchasers. If this is combined with fast and easy rights and re-use clearing services, along with distribution, then the libraries can still provide a useful and profitable service to both the producers of content (the photographers) and the consumers.

(I was surprised that very little was said about an editorial role for image collections - another area that value can be added is through collection curation and branding. So, you know that the best place to get UK landscape shots is from such-and-such a collection, etc. However, this is much harder to maintain, manage, and promote.)

Image metadata

I gave an overview of the history of metadata for knowledge organisation, with an emphasis on aspects that are peculiar to image libraries. For example, still images do not come with text attached, so natural language processing and concept extraction techniques that can drive document and text-based search systems can only be a second step for image libraries, once some text has been generated to associate with stills.

I was very pleased that a couple of the key themes that I introduced in my talk were picked up and elaborated on by other presenters.

Linked Data and crowdsourcing

Mary Forster from Getty Images went into detail about Linked Data and how this is being used to enhance Getty’s services and image management, by using linked data concept URIs to index images. She explained the differences between text matching and concept linking, and how text matching is far more noisy and imprecise than concept linking, and how using concepts enables flexible management of metadata structures so that creation of complex associations can be automated.

Andrew Ellis from the My Paintings project with the Public Catalogue Foundation talked about how they had successfully managed crowdsourcing by putting in place a sophisticated number of ways of managing the capture of the metadata. For example, rather than only offering unconstrained free tagging, taggers were invited to select tags from a dictionary list, in order to disambiguate concepts. They were also invited to select from a number of pre-set facets driven by controlled vocabularies - image type, style, etc. This made it easy to integrate the free tagging within an existing navigational scheme.

Content-based image retrieval

Mathieu from Xerox then talked about content-based image retrieval. Xerox have been working on sophisticated image analysis techniques designed to find images that have similar qualities to other images. They have a series of algorithms that analyse image “texture” and create a “Digital fingerprint” of an image. Other images with very similar fingerprints tend to look similar. This means that you can train the system with sets of example images, and it can then identify similar images in the collection. This can be used as an image autoclassification tool, as you can set up your training sets to be useful categories (famous landmarks, pop stars, tigers, etc.) and then sort your images into these categories. Xerox trained their system’s 706 categories using 1.5 million images.

The system works very well with distinct and easily recognisable images - iconic images like the Sydney Opera house for example - and on large collections where there are clear and obvious “hits” and “misses”. It doesn’t work well with concepts such as politics or history, as it is hard to come up with key images for the training set, nor moods - inspirational, happy, tranquil, etc. However, for large collections with no metadata, it offers a good way of adding structured metadata to make a collection navigable. Another interesting use is to identify duplicate images, so you could use it to assess the contents of a collection to find gaps (“we have hundreds of images of Tower Bridge, but none of the Golden Gate bridge”, etc.).

Perhaps it even has a potential use for TV producers editing rushes on a shoot - “we already have hundreds of shots of the sunset over the mountains, but hardly any close-ups of skiers”, for example.

I guess one day there will be a market for “controlled imageries” - training sets of example images to use as basis for such autoclassification software.

You can try it here.

Rights, IPO, orphan works

Nancy Wolff and Antoinette Graves of the IPO talked about rights and the law. Nancy stated that the need to be found is becoming more critical. Orphan works legislation advocates in the US want to de-risk usage so that images can be used even when it is not clear who they belong to or the owner is known but cannot be found.
Nancy noted that proposals for rights registries are being enthusiastically supported by Google but also that whoever owns such registries will not only make a lot of money but will also control access to and usage of content.

Antoinette pointed out that in the UK at present there is no diligent search that will allow for the use of an “orphan work”. This makes it very hard for publishers to be sure that they will not be prosecuted. There is a notable difference between “old” orphan works in museums, etc. and “new” orphans caused by metadata stripping.

Future of image search and rights management

In the afternoon I attended an interesting breakout session on the future of search, with a large and impressive panel. Rights management was a cited as a huge issue to resolve, with a call for slick seamless user-friendly payment systems, to enable people to buy images and re-use them legally, without friction and effort. Technology was seen as the answer to an essentially technology-created problem. Free distribution over the internet meant that people had a sense of entitlement - a sense that content ought to be free, mistaking the differences between free content and freedom of information.

Managing digital rights is not the same as imposing “lockout” DRM systems. There is a need to devise licensing methods that are based on understanding machine-to-machine communication, rights description metadata, etc. No-one wants to invest in content creation any more, largely because the protection of rights is so difficult, making content creation a very risky business. If this trend is to be reversed, technological solutions to the problems of rights clearances must be found.

Predictions for the future were that crowd sourcing would become increasingly important. Interestingly crowd-sourcing relies on the notion of people working for nothing, and I couldn’t help noticing the contrast between the professional photographers trying to stop “amateurs” destroying their living by providing images without expecting payment, but being perfectly happy for people to add metadata without being paid for their work.

The need to get money into the system somewhere in order to enable anyone to get paid was emphasised and I suppose when an industry is facing diminishing returns, everybody involved in the supply chain puts pressure on everyone else to cut their costs or work for nothing.
I can’t help thinking that the deluge of images from all sources is going to mean that findability - and hence metadata - will become even more significant as more and more images chase fewer and fewer users willing to pay for them.

One of the problems with the word metadata (apart from the fact that no-one can decide whether it should be singular or plural - as a former classicist I am quite happy to use it in the Anglicized singular form!) is that the word covers such a wide range of data required for a huge variety of uses.

At a recent presentation I gave as part of a “knowledge share” session at the digital design agency Tobias and Tobias, I was rightly challenged by Patrick from Golant Media Ventures, when I said that you should not embed metadata in your content, but manage it separately. He pointed out that for copyright and rights management purposes embedded metadata is extremely useful and in fact many content creators are actively campaigning to make sure that software and service providers do not strip metadata out of content when it is transferred or transcoded.

Embedding information versus embedding IDs

He is quite right, but I was right too – just in a different sense. It is a complex and important point, so I thought it was worth expanding on. I was talking about not embedding metadata structures in assets when you can manage structures of primarily semantic metadata separately. You can do this by embedding only IDs in the assets, and then using those as lookups to access the structure as and when you need to, picking up the structure “on the fly”. The principle remains the same whether you are talking about “private” localised IDs or “public” IDs, such as Linked Open Data dereferenceable URIs (i.e. website addresses you can look up). Such an approach allows you to manage the structures and meanings contextualising those IDs separately from managing the assets themselves.

The reason is mainly technical. If you wish to add to or edit the structure of your taxonomy (or ontology) or change the information your URI points to, it is far easier to do this in one place than it is to find all the assets containing that metadata and re-index them all individually every time you make a change. So, if you store taxonomy pathways as hard-coded text strings in a piece of content, but then you decide to alter the hierarchy, you have to go back to each and every occurrence of that text string applied to content and update it, in each and every asset record that contains it. Sometimes this might be fine – if you know that you are hardly ever going to change the structure or if you have very few assets, or if you have a very powerful and sophisticated re-indexing service. Generally, however, given that language is constantly evolving and asset collections are constantly growing and changing, the “hard-coding” approach is going to require an awful lot of processing and so will be very resource hungry.

If, on the other hand, all you embed in your asset record is an ID, you can use an external system to provide the context for that ID – the pathways of the taxonomy, the relationships of an ontology, the semantic sense of a URI. You can then alter your taxonomy’s hierarchies (e.g. adding and moving concept nodes) or develop your ontology (e.g. adding new classes and relationships) in one centralised system without having to go back to every individual indexed asset in turn. This also means that you can de-couple your taxonomy or ontology management system from your digital asset management or content management system. This is important if you want more sophisticated metadata management than standard DAM, search, or CMS software provides, or if you want to future proof your semantic structures.

Modular systems are more future proof

By keeping asset management and metadata management separate you can upgrade either part without having to upgrade the other. As semantic technologies – such as ontology editing systems – are going through a rapid phase of development, and in general evolving faster than search, DAM, and other consuming systems, maintaining your semantic structures in as transferable and system agnostic form as possible shows foresight. Conversely, you may want to invest only a little in a DAM system, with the hope that business will grow and you will be able to upgrade as your content collections increase. If you have a separate metadata management system you should be able to keep that, while changing your DAM system.

Rights management is different

However, all this primarily concerns internal content and metadata management. Where embedding metadata in the asset itself makes most sense is when that metadata is metadata that you want to remain fixed to that asset and be published with it - for example, details of where a photo was taken, who owns the copyright and how to get in touch with them to licence re-use of that photo. This is because making that information hard to strip out means that when your asset wanders out into the public world of the Internet and frequent uncontrollable copying, you want users to be able to find out easily the origins of the image and its ownership.

A huge problem for collection of royalties and licensing payments is that people who would be willing to pay simply don’t know who to pay. Deliberate piracy will always be a cost – just as shops will always have to allow for a certain amount of “shrinkage” due to shoplifting, but physical shops tend to be pretty good at making sure customers who are willing to pay can find plenty of checkout tills, self-service checkouts, or sales assistants. Keeping rights information embedded in assets is the equivalent of the checkout, not the security camera.

How important is being up to date?

Of course, the problem of updating remains – so if copyrights are transferred, all those assets that have gone out with old embedded metadata contain out of date information. So, rights managers are increasingly moving towards a system of embedding dereferenceable IDs as well. One example is the EIDR system that uses this method (as well as other techniques) to manage rights. By embedding an ID that links to a centralised rights registry, information can be updated once within that central registry, and then whenever someone looks up that ID, they get the most up to date details.

So, we are both right in a way. Embedding IDs and managing metadata separately to managing assets has many advantages. Embedding the metadata itself can also be useful, especially if it is rights information of assets that will be released onto the public Internet and is information that you may not need to update, but that you do not want to be lost when the asset is copied.

I was delighted to be asked by the DAM Foundation to join a panel for Communicate Magazine’s Transform conference, talking about metadata and its importance in digital asset management and brand management, with a focus on re-branding (hence the conference title). I spoke alongside Mark Davey, from the DAM Foundation, Romney Whitehead of Net a Porter, and Phil Morton, of Freestyle Interactive.

Marketing meets metadata

I was heartened by the growing enthusiasm for bringing together “geeky” metadata specialists with “creative” marketing people. I think both communities of practice have a lot to learn from each other, even though it may seem we speak totally different languages and care about totally different things. I do my best to act as a “boundary object” or translator bringing together our different perspectives - I like to joke that my role is all about putting the “sexy into taxonomy”.

I find conferences are a great source of serendipitous discovery, making me think about business needs and processes that I don’t usually encounter in my day job. One example was a presentation about the recent major re-branding project by Global Blue - the tax free shopping corporation. I learned about the breakdown of the distinction between global and local marketing campaigns and customer service. This is because the luxury shopping market is aimed at the global travelling community who fly around the world and prefer shopping to visiting museums and art galleries. High-end brands need to provide services for these customers not locally to their home towns, but in the shops they visit, by - for example, having Russian- and Chinese-speaking sales assistants in outlets in Paris, London, and Berlin.

In data terms, this means making sure customer relations management is global, and marketing campaigns travel with the customer as they move, rather than being tied to places. This requires sophisticated personal and social metadata management. It is no longer enough to keep customer data in localised silos, as a customer wants to be recognised at every store in the chain everywhere in the world. In other words, there is no such thing as local for these shoppers any more, there is only location - local is wherever they happen to be right now.

This may seem like an obvious point, but for information managers it poses many challenges regarding data security and compliance with different laws in different countries. For brand managers, marketers, and designers, it means devising campaigns that make sense in local cultures, but also appeal to viewers from all over the world.

DAM to protect good supplier as well as customer relations

Romney Whitehead described how important it is for Net a Porter to track the rights, restrictions, and usage of their content as it is used in different media and in different parts of the world. So, if they have acquired the rights to images of a fashion show in Paris, they may only be able to use those shots in certain locations or in particular publications (Europe, but not the USA, print but not online, etc.). Mistakes could lead to their suppliers refusing to provide images in future, which would be very damaging for the company. Their DAM system is therefore vital to their business.

Internally social

Phil Morton talked about the rise of social media and how corporations need to embrace social media in particular for in-house corporate communications and knowledge management. Many organisations still see social media as something that happens “outside” the organisation, but for younger workers and for collaborative projects, internal social media is becoming a key daily business tool, so information managers have to consider how to provide access to and archiving of key social media conversations.

This is clearly a hot topic, as it was discussed at a Sue Hill networking event I attended last week and which I will write about in my next post.

Back in 1995 my brother wrote his MA dissertation on copyright: Of Cows and Calves: An Analysis of Copyright and Authorship (with Implications for Future Developments in Communications Media) or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Home-Taping. It is interesting how relevant it remains today, especially in the light of the Hargreaves Report delivered to the government in May. Essentially, nothing much has changed in the intervening 16 years. My brother reflected the predictions of the profound changes that digital technologies would make - and were already making - to the creative industries. Although details such as the excitement over ISDN lines and no mention of mobile technologies date his work, the core issues he covers - who owns and idea and who should get paid for it – remain remarkably current.

I’ve written a brief overview of the Hargreaves Report for Information Today, Europe. The two aspects of most interest to me are the proposals for a Digital Copyright Exchange and for handling of orphan works.

Ideas as objects

My brother argues that creative works are all part of an ongoing cultural dialogue that no one individual can really “own” and that copyright only made sense for the short period of time where technology reified ideas as artefacts that could be traded as commodities (like potatoes or coal). The business model of “content” as “physical item” started to fail with the invention of the printing press, as the process of copying ceased to be a creative act, so each individual copy was not a “new” work in its own right. Copyright law was developed to commodify the “idea” within a book, not the physical book and was enforceable for only as long as access to the copying technologies - printing presses - could be limited. The digital age has made control of the copying process impossible, as the computer replaced the printing press, so one could exist on every desk, and now, thanks to mobile technology, in every pocket. He notes that in pre-literate societies, authorship of a myth or a folklore was not important, and I find it interesting that crowd sourcing (e.g. Wikipedia, citizen journalism) has in some ways returned us to the notion of a culturally held store of knowledge contributed and curated by volunteers, rather than by paid professionals.

Music is not the only art

Many of the discussions of free v. paid for content seem to run to extremes, and seem to be coloured by the popular music industry’s taste for excess. The music industry inflated commodity prices far beyond what consumers were willing to pay just as cheap copying technologies became widely available, making the pirates feel morally justified. It is hard to feel sympathy for people living a millionaire rockstar lifestyle. The inevitable increase in piracy was met not by lower prices, but by the industry issuing alarmist statements about home taping killing music. It didn’t! Music industry profits have risen steadily. The industry has simply turned its attention to charging more for merchandise and live events. The lesson to be learned is that people are willing to pay for experiences, services, and commodities that they perceive as being worth the price and better than the alternatives. Most music fans would rather pay for an easy, virus-free reliable download service than deal with illegal download sites, just as back in the 1980s sticking a microphone in front of the radio to record the charts wasn’t as good as buying the vinyl. The effects on the reference publishing industry were very different, affecting many small businesses and people on far less than rockstar wages, but most displaced people found ways to transfer their skills to numerous new areas of work – obvious examples are content strategy or user experience design – that simply didn’t exist in the 1990s.

It has become a bit of a cliche that there aren’t any business models that work, or have been shown to work, in the new digital economy, but are things really so different? In order to have a business somebody somewhere has to be persuaded to pay for something. Everything else is just a complication. If your free content is supported by advertising, it just means that someone needs to be persuaded to pay for the advertised product, instead of the free bit that appears on the way. Similarly, “freemium” is really just old-style free samples and loss leaders. You can’t have the “free” bit without paying for the “premium”. The two key questions for producers remains, as they have always been, how do you produce content that is so useful, entertaining, or attractive that people are willing to pay for it, and how do you deliver it in ways that make the buying process as easy as possible?

Hargreaves suggests a light touch towards enforcement of rights and anti-piracy, firmly supporting the view that if content and services are good enough, people will pay, and that education about why artists have a right to be paid for their work is as important as catching the pirates. Attempting to “lock” copies with Digital Rights Management systems certainly don’t seem to have been very successful. They are expensive to implement, unpopular, and pirates always manage to hack them. Watermarking doesn’t attempt to prevent copying but does help prove origin if a breach is discovered. Piracy is less of a worry for business-to-business trade, as most legitimate businesses want to be sure they have the correct rights and licences for content they use, rather than face embarrassing and expensive lawsuits, and a simplified, secure Digital Copyright Exchange would presumably be in their interests.

Digital Copyright Exchange

Hargreaves proposes the Digital Copyright Exchange as a mechanism to make the buying and selling of rights far easier. At the moment, piracy can be a temptation because of the time and effort required to attempt to purchase rights. Collections agencies and the law form layers of bureaucracy that hamper start-ups from developing new products and simply confuse ordinary users. This represents real lost revenue to the content providers.

Metadata analyst and music fan Sam Kuper suggested an interesting proposal for setting fair prices – that artists should put a “reserve price” on their work, with an initial fee for purchasers. Once the “reserve price” has been reached, any subsequent purchase is shared between the artist and the early purchasers. This would guarantee a level of income for artists, allow keen fans to get hold of new material quickly, and allow those less sure to wait to see if the price drops before purchase. Such a system sounds complex, but could work through some kind of centralised system, so that “returns” to early purchasers would be returned as credits to their accounts.

From an archive point of view, Hargreaves’s call to allow the digitisation and release of orphan works without endless detective work in trying to trace origins would be a huge boon.

So, there is much to think about in the Hargreaves report and some very sensible practical suggestions, but much detail to be worked out as well. I wonder if in another 16 years, my brother and I will have seen any real change or will we still be going through the same debate?

I met Rob Wilson of RCWS consulting at the DAM London conference last summer, where he talked about digital identifiers. He has long career working on information architecture for range of organisations and industry standards bodies, including the ultimately doomed e-GMS project, which was an attempt to unify government metadata standards for sharing and interoperability.

Identifiers are a hot topic at the moment, and so I was pleased Rob was willing to talk to me and some of my colleagues about some of the problems and attempts at solving them in the wider industry. Rob described the need for stable and persistent IDs for asset management and that this is not a new problem but one that has been worked on by various groups for many years. He distinguished between ID management and metadata management, pointing out that metadata may change but the ID of an asset can be kept stable. In just the same way that managing metadata as a distinct element of content is important, so IDs need to be managed as distinct from other metadata.

Rob is an independent consultant and has no commercial affiliation with the EIDR content asset identifier system, but suggested it is a robust model in many ways. The EIDR system embeds IDs within asset files, using a combination of steganography, strong encryption, and watermarking and “triangulation” of combined aspects to create a single ID. The idea is that the ID is so deeply ingrained and fragmented within the structure of the file that it cannot easily be removed and can be recovered from a small fraction of the file - e.g. if someone takes a clip from a video, the “parent” ID is discoverable from the clip. Rob thought the EIDR system was better than digital rights management (DRM) methods, which rely on trying to prevent distribution, and “locking” content after a certain amount of time or use, which gives an incentive to everyone who has such content to try to break the DRM system. If an individual can still access their illegally held content despite the ID, they have little incentive to try to remove the ID.

The system does not try to prevent theft from source, but helps to prove when copyright has been breached, because the ID - the ownership - remains within the file. It is intended as a tool to deter systematic copyright theft by large organisations, by making legal cases easy to win. Large organisations typically have the funds, or insurances, to cover large claims, unlike individuals, so it is unlikely to be cost-effective to pursue individuals.

The EIDR system also has an ID resolver that manages rights and supply authentication (as well as ownership) so that when content is accessed, the system checks that the appropriate rights and licences have been obtained before delivery.

Rob also outlined the elements of information architecture that need to be considered for unified organisational information management - establish standards, develop models, devise policies, select tools, maintain governance, etc. He emphasised that IDs are not a “silver bullet” to solve all issues, but that if a few problematic key use cases are known, they can be investigated to see if robust federated ID management architecture would help.

This is another write-up from the Henry Stewart DAM London conference.

Identity and identification

Robin Wilson discussed the issue of content identifiers, which are vitally important for digital rights management, but yet tend to be overlooked. He argued that although people become engaged in debates about titles and the language used in labels and classification systems, people overlook the need to achieve consensus on basic identification.

(I was quite surprised, as I have always thought that people would argue passionately about what something should be called and how using the wrong terminology affects usability, but that they would settle on machine-readable IDs quite happily. Perhaps it is the neutrality of such codes that makes the politics intractable. If you have invested huge amounts of money in a database that demands certain codes, you will argue that those codes are used by everyone else to save you the costs of translation or acquiring a compatible system, and there are no appeals to usability, or brokerage via editorial policy, that can be made. It simply becomes a matter of whoever shouts the loudest gets to spend the least money in the short term. )

Robin argued that the only way to create an efficient digital marketplace is to have a trusted authority oversee a system of digital identifiers that are tightly bound within the digital asset, so they cannot easily be stripped out even when an asset is divided, split, shared, and copied. The authority needs to be trusted by consumers and creators/publishers in terms of political neutrality, stability, etc.

(I could understand how this system would make it easier for people who are willing to pay for content to see what rights they need to buy and who they should pay, but I couldn’t see how the system could help content owners identify plagiarism without an active search mechanism. Presumably a digital watermark would persist throughout copies of an asset, provided that it wasn’t being deliberately stripped, but if the user simply decided not to pay, I don’t see how the system would help identify rights breaches. Robin mentioned in conversation Turnitin’s plagiarism management, which has become more lucrative than their original work on content analysis, but it requires an active process instigated by the content owner to search for unauthorised use of their content. This is fine for the major publishers of the world, who can afford to pay for such services, but is less appealing to individuals, whether professional freelances or amateur content creators, who would need a cheap and easy solution that would alert them to breaches of copyright without their having to spend time searching.)

The identifiers themselves need to be independent of any specific technology. At the moment, DAM systems are often proprietary and therefore identifiers and metadata cannot easily flow from one system to another. Some systems even strip away any metadata associated with a file on import and export.

Robin described five types of identifier currently being used or developed:

• Uniform Resource Name (URN)
• Handle System
• Digital Object Identifier
• Persistent URL (PURL)
• ARK (Archival Resource Key).

He outlined three essential qualities for identifiers - that they be unique, globally registered, and locally resolved.

So why don’t we share?

Robin argued that it is easier for DAM vendors to build “safe” systems that lock all content within an enterprise environment, only those with a public service/archival remit tend to be collaborative and open. DAM vendors resist a federated approach online and prefer to use a one-to-one or directly intermediated transaction model. Federated identifier management services exist but vendors and customers don’t trust them. The problem is mainly social, not technological.

One of the problems is agreeing to share the costs of services, such as infrastructure, registration and validation, governance and development of the system, administration, and outreach and marketing.

(Efforts to standardise may well benefit the big players more than the small players and so there is a strong argument for them bearing the initial costs and offering support for smaller players to join. Once enough people opt in, the system gains critical mass and it becomes both easier to join and costs of joining become less of an unquantifiable risk – you can benefit from the experiences of others. The semantic web is currently attempting to acquire this “critical mass”. As marketers realise the potential of semantic web technology to make money, no doubt we will see an upsurge in interest. Facebook’s “like” button may well be heralding the advent of the ad-driven semantic web, which will probably drive uptake far faster than the worthy efforts of academics to improve the world by sharing research data!)