Picture Metadata and its Associations: Using Web Technologies for Representing Semantics

Web technologies today go far beyond simply enabling the creation of Web pages. XML and metadata formats based on it make it possible to manage metadata in a powerful and flexible way. In this paper, we describe the concept and the prototype of an application for the management of metadata for a specific domain, metadata associated with pictures. The goal of the paper is to highlight the benefits which result from employing Web technologies instead of proprietary data formats. While we think that both application developers as well as users could benefit from such an approach, we are aware that in many real-world cases other issues (such as the ability to bind users to a certain product) also play an important role. Nevertheless, in this paper we show that open and well-documented technologies not only can make software development easier, but also open up synergies between standards-compliant products. While the prototype we present in this paper is not sophisticated enough to be released to the general public, we hope that software vendors will consider incorporating some of the concepts introduced in this paper.