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.

BackStory
The research work reported on here is firmly situated within the emerging field of the Digital re-Discovery of Culture (DrDC) (Sotirova, 2005). Taking image (painting, photograph, publicity image (Berger, 1972, p. 129), television, film…) as typical focal point for (post)modern culture, we explore to what extent one can be lead to an experience of personal «physicality of soul» (FoS) in a playful way, an entertaining way, perhaps through a purposeful designed game (DrDCg) on the internet, to that self-awakening of one’s own (people’s) cultural spirit. Note our use of “«” and “»” to denote a key concept. In the Semantic Web Ontology Language (OWL) we would write PhysicalityOfSoul. For acronym construction we follow a convention of choosing phonetic F in place of lexical Ph to give FoS.

Let us look at the case of a painting: to see it in digital form, even of the highest resolution, can never match the face to face encounter between the actual painting, wherever it may be, and the spectator. Such face to face encounter is one class of FoS. A part of that FoS is to see the detail of the brushwork of the painter, to see the colours exactly as they are in the light setting of the exhibit, gallery, museum, church, mosque…. On the other hand, for most people, paintings can only ever be seen in their print form and in their digital form. The former is exclusive and/or expensive. The latter is inclusive and essentially free. In each case there is a different FoS. The print form is intended to match that of the original. But if the original is a mural like Guernica (Figure 2), then physical experience of scale (350.5 x 782.3 cm) is not possible in the printed form. For comparison, the scale of the print in (Thompson, 2006, pp. 198-199) is about 11.7 x 26.1 cm. A certain degree of physical experience of scale is possible in the digital world. One may be presented with a % size indicator of the image and the possibility of panning and zooming such as used in the National Gallery, London (Mantegna, 1505-6). The physical location of paintings such as Guernica, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, in Madrid is also out of (physicality) bounds for most people.

Download pdf Keyimage Ontologization & Folksonomy in Web 2.0 Social Space