Ookaboo Celebrates A Belated First Anniversary
Paul Houle
more than 940,000 images of 500,000 different things and we've got plans
that will take us past a million.
We've got a style of introducing new features gradually, so our
announcements haven't kept track with our improvements.
Perhaps the most exciting change is that Ookaboo now allows users
to select images from Flickr and attach them to specific topics. We're
trying to get users to help us fill in gaps from our other image
sources, and also to provide a different point of view. The old
process for loading images, for instance, got a lot of black and white
1940's government photographs of WWII combat aircraft. From Flickr, we
find photos of antique planes being flown at today's airshows, close
shots of (somewhat modified) cockpits, and children sitting in the turrets.
We'd love to get your feedback about the image selection process
and also invite you to subscribe to our RSS feed that will show new
images as they come in.
We've also clarified our policies about offensive content and
topics and have been able to filter a great deal of it out using
semantic techniques.
We last worked on our API and RDF output quite a few months ago,
when Ookaboo contained much less content. We're planning to release an
regular NT dump that will make it possible to query Ookaboo with your
favorite triple store -- and we'd like your feedback about vocabulary
you'd like to see.