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Audiovisual Core
http://www.tdwg.org/standards/638
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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Problems with Iptc4xmpExt:CVterm #230

Closed edwbaker closed 1 month ago

edwbaker commented 2 years ago

Following on from discussions at https://github.com/tdwg/camtrap-dp/issues/191

See also early discussion of potential problem

Various possibilities to improve the situation here:

baskaufs commented 1 year ago

I've been thinking some about this issue again in the context of the severe need for people to describe that an image or a ROI is a label. #200

Despite the various potential problems related to whether our use of Iptc4xmpExt:CVterm is exactly correct based on the IPTC specs, it has been a part of AC for a long time and from the standpoint of stability, it might be best to just keep it rather than coming up with a new term or recommending something else.

I was thinking a bit about how I've seen dcterms:subject being used in other contexts. It seems like it is more commonly used to describe the topic of something than to describe the actual thing itself. For example, a photo of people carrying signs in a protest might have the subject as "protest", whereas an actual description of what's in the photo would be things like "person", "sign", "flag", "fire", etc. In the library realm, one would probably use Library of Congress subject headings as values, and again it would be more what a book or images is "about" rather than what's depicted in it. So I'm thinking that dcterms:subject isn't the best thing to use in this case where we are actually trying to describe what's in the image.

It seems to me that a reasonable course of action that would mostly be consistent with existing use but also promote clarity would be to do the following:

  1. Recommend that dcterms:description be used for a textual description. This could be free text or a controlled value string if people preferred.
  2. Recommend that Iptc4xmpExt:CVterm be used with an unabbreviated IRI. That's allowable under the current AC guidelines and (probably) consistent with the intent of the IPTC (although they seem to suggest using a namespace abbreviation rather than a full URI).
  3. Mint an AC controlled vocabulary for the terms that we know we need right now. That would include things typically designated in specimen images such as label and color bar. In the interest of closing #166, we could also include something for "habitat". Would we also include "organism", "organism part", or something else to indicate that the ROI or whole image primarily includes something that would subsequently be described by subjectPart and subjectOrientation.

This would be a bit at odds with the existing pattern of x and xLiteral, but I think it makes more sense to use the terms we already have.

baskaufs commented 1 year ago

What I've suggested is consistent with the examples illustrated in https://github.com/tdwg/ac/issues/200#issuecomment-963567163

The larger project suggested in https://github.com/tdwg/camtrap-dp/issues/191#issuecomment-1030732612 would still be a good idea, but I can't see myself actually doing it at any point in the near future.

There would of course be people using Iptc4xmpExt:CVterm with controlled strings rather than IRIs, since that's what's suggested in the existing AC guidance for the term. But moving people to IRIs would probably be best in the long run since controlled strings from a bunch of different random vocabularies aren't guaranteed to be unique.

baskaufs commented 1 year ago

Capturing some thoughts from Katja Seltmann:

  1. would ac:tag also be an appropriate place to include "label", "label on image", etc. (vs. dcterms:description)
  2. other abiotic things associated with specimens could include scale bars in addition to color bars and labels. The paleo community may have other examples.
edwbaker commented 1 month ago

Will be closed by #246