What do the default metadata fields mean?

[Terry Hancock]

I've been looking, but I haven't been able to find an explanation of what the default metadata fields in Resource Space mean. Is there table or discussion of these somewhere? There isn't even any "Help Text" for them.

I mean some are obvious, like "Original filename", but others like "Named Person(s)" and "Source" could mean a number of different things.

Also, are the fields arbitrary, or do these default fields have some special significance?

I created an "Attribution" field, but then I noticed there is  "Credit" field among the defaults. I'm not sure if it's exactly identical in meaning, but it might be, and I'm not sure if there's any particular reason I should call this field "Credit", or is it just as good to delete the "Credit" field and use my custom "Attribution" field instead (IOW, do I lose any functionality by doing that?)

Some of the fields resemble Dublin Core, but they're not identical to it. So it's not simple a matter of complying with DC.

I kind of want to get my metadata fields straight before I start trying to load resources -- surely it's easier to get them right at the beginning than to change them over later.

Thanks!
Terry

[Allison Stec]

Exiftool really opens the world of metadata for RS. If you haven't already, have a look at the supported tag names and their associated fields. Be sure to note that most, but not all fields can be written to:  http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/index.html

Some default fields are linked to metadata fields that exiftool can extract (see the exiftool field setting for each field on the field edit page).

A select few fields are linked to columns in the resource table. I don't believe there's any way to see this other than looking at the resource table in the db. I'd strongly consider keeping these fields, as it's not easy to remake them from within the application.

The rest are not linked to metadata fields at all!

Regardless of their associations, you can change the title of any field without concern.

While I'm not well versed in Dublin Core, I believe what you'll have to do is take their elements and see if you can relate them back to metadata fields that exiftool can extract. As a result, you may have multiple extension specific fields that can populate things such as Title, Contributor, Rights, etc.  How you choose to handle that is up to you!

As an additional note, you may decide that you don't want to try to extract any metadata from files. In this situation you can create the fields you need and delete non-essential fields.

FWIW, there are a fair amount of tools available in RS should you choose to add new fields to existing resources.

Allison Stec
Senior Developer & Asset Management Specialist
Colorhythm
http://www.colorhythm.com

Main Office: +1 415-399-9921
Fax: +1 415-399-9928

as...@colorhythm.com

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[Terry Hancock]

Hi Allison,

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 8:03 AM, Allison Stec <ste...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Some default fields are linked to metadata fields that exiftool can extract
> (see the exiftool field setting for each field on the field edit page).

Yeah, I see a field with some names in it. I suppose this means that
EXIF fields with these names will be mapped to this field.

> A select few fields are linked to columns in the resource table.

Hmm. That's the kind of mysterious behavior I was concerned about. "Magic". :-)

> Regardless of their associations, you can change the title of any field
> without concern.

Okay, that's very useful to know -- none of the magic is keyed on the
name. I guess it's one of the integers that's mentioned on the
metadata page that is the actual index-link for the field?

> FWIW, there are a fair amount of tools available in RS should you choose to
> add new fields to existing resources.

Yeah, and it doesn't seem like the scripts are too hard to write. I'd
like to find a way to pull text fields from Blender files, since I've
been keeping metadata in the files.

Looks like that can be done by invoking a Python script from the
Blender commandline. Might make a nice add-on. I'll look into it.

Thank you for your help.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock
Producer/Director - "Lunatics!" Project - http://lunatics.tv

[Warwick Barnes]

G'day Terry,

It's worth keeping in mind that some default fields are set to show up in particular places. For example in the standard medium-thumbnails search results view the title (field #8) and country (field #3) display below each thumbnail. (This can be changed in config.php.) It doesn't matter if you change the name of these fields because the configuration works on the field number.

There's also an automatic nightly process where ResourceSpace attempts to use the country field to fill-in the latitude and longitude metadata. We changed the name of our country field to "location" (because we wanted to be more specific) but then this automatic lookup process doesn't work because in this case it doesn't look for the field number but for the name of the field: "country".

I read somewhere that "Named persons" is supposed to be a comma-separated list of the names of significant people in the image, from left-to-right. That's how we've been using this field.

One field we added was "Alternative text". This is not only important to meet disability access requirements, but alternative text has also proven to be very useful for searching. I'm wanting to suggest that this should be a default field for new installations of ResourceSpace because it's so important. I'm not sure where the best place to make this suggestion is though.

Cheers,

Warwick

[Stuart Bithell]

Hi Warwick, 

I'm probably missing something really obvious, so apologies in advance, but what exactly is the "Alternative text" field?

Is it just a standard field, or does it require anything extra? Such as a display template, or extra code? Can you explain the benefits?

The project is being used by many not-for-profits who have stringent accessibility requirements, which is why we developed the accessibility plugin a while back. We're always happy to take a look at improvements.

Cheers,

Stuart

[Warwick Barnes]

G'day Stuart,

I'm meaning alternative (or 'alt') text as described on this page: http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

Since ResourceSpace allows us to add custom metadata fields, we added "Alternative text" as a single-line text field, with some help text to explain to people uploading photos:

"Enter a short text equivalent for this image – similar to how you'd describe this image to someone over the telephone. This is important for search engines and disability access."

We're used to the requirement for alt-text on web images, but are still coming to grips with the fact that this is needed for images in Word documents, etc as well. Having alt-text as one of our metadata fields in ResourceSpace is a good way to emphasise its importance.

It's a bonus that the alt-text field is really good for searching: due to the objective and descriptive language that tends to get used in this field. The title and caption often explain why the image is important or what the background information is, but it's often only the alt-text that tells you objectively what's visible in the image.

For example, the caption might have, "Project team celebrate start of phase 1", but the alt-text could have, "four people standing holding champagne glasses, in the middle of an empty field".

Some images (rightly or wrongly) even end up with sarcasm or jokes in the caption. For example, a photo of me asleep in my chair at work could have the caption, "Warwick working hard, as usual", but the alt-text would have, "Office worker asleep in chair". So even if you can't see the image you can understand the joke.

Cheers,

Warwick