The Digital Exhibition and Keyimage Ontology

Abstract

The Age of Image predates and is currently contemporaneous with the Information Age. In our times the explosive expansion of Web 2.0 Social Space, typified by the phenomena of De.licio.us, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube…, and the concomitant emergence of folksonomy, present interesting challenges in the management of this information. One key process by which to accomplish this in Social Space, is the wedding of folksonomy (of the people) with ontology (of the machine). Such a wedding must necessarily be conducted in the shared physicality of the word, of language. In this respect, WordNet together with OWL, play the role of matchmaker. But the same Social Space also provides an opportunity for natural folksonomical tagging by digiFoto (key)image. The research harness for experimental keyimage tagging consists of Flickr as the main (digiFoto image) Social Space testbed and De.licio.us as the auxillary outreach secondary Social Space. Protégé Editor with OWL-DL provides the support for the bridge from keyimage to the formal ontology. The primary end user application domain is the keyimage tagging of paintings in an online art gallery.