The Growing Value of Metadata in a Digital Landscape

Margaret Warren As a 10-year-old photographer, Margaret Warren would jot down on the back of each printed photo metadata about who took the picture, who was in it, and where it was taken. Her interest in image metadata continued into her adult life, culminating the creation of ImageSnippets, a service that lets anyone add linked open data descriptions to their images. We talked about: her work to make images more discoverable with metadata connected via a knowledge graph how her early childhood history as a metadata strategist, her background in computing technology, and her personal interest in art and a photography shows up in her product, ImageSnippets her takes on the basics of metadata strategy and practice the many types of metadata: descriptive, administrative, technical, etc. the role of metadata in the new AI world some of the good and bad reasons that social media platforms might remove metadata from images privacy implications of metadata in social media the linked data principles that she applies in ImageSnippets and how they're managed in the product's workflow her wish that CMSs and social media platforms would not strip the metadata from images as they ingest them the lightweight image ontology that underlies her ImageSnippets product her prediction that the importance of metadata that supports provenance, demonstrates originality, and sets context will continue to grow in the future Margaret's bio Margaret Warren is a technologist, researcher and artist/content creator. She is the founder and CEO of Metadata Authoring Systems whose mission is to make the most obscure images on the web findable, and easily accessible by describing and preserving them in the most precise ways possible. To assist with this mission, she is the creator of a system called, ImageSnippets which can be used by anyone to build linked data descriptions of images into graphs. She is also a research associate with the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition, one of the primary organizers of a group called The Dataworthy Collective and is a member of the IPTC (International Press and Telecommunications Council) photo-metadata working group and the Research Data Alliance charter on Collections as Data. As a researcher, Margaret's primary focus is at the intersection of semantics, metadata, knowledge representation and information science particularly around visual content, search and findability. She is deeply interested in how people describe what they experience visually and how to capture and formalize this knowledge into machine readable structures. She creates tools and processes for humans but augmented by machine intelligence. Many of these tools are useful for unifying the many types of metadata and descriptions of images - including the very important context element - into ontology infused knowledge graphs. Her tools can be used for tasks as advanced as complex domain modeling but can also facilitate image content to be shared and published while staying linked to it's metadata across workflows. Learn more and connect with Margaret online LinkedIn Patreon Bluesky Substack ImageSnippets Metadata Authoring Systems personal and art site IPTC links IPTC Photo Metadata Software that supports IPTC Photo Metadata Get IPTC Photo Metadata Browser extensions for IPTC Photo Metadata Resource not mentioned in podcast (but very useful for examining structured metadata in web pages) OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer (OSDS) Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/pjoAAq5zuRk Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 21. Nowadays, we are all immersed in a deluge of information and media, especially images. The real value of these images is captured in the metadata about them. Without information about the history of an image, its technical details, and the context in which it originated, it might as well be a piece of random clip art. Margaret Warren is the creator of ImageSnippets, a tool that helps you create and manage the metadata that imbues your images with meaning. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 21 of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show my friend, Margaret Warren. Margaret and I helped co-organize a weekly event called The Dataworthy Collective, which is a collaborative learning environment, but she's better known as the CEO and the CTO of a company called Metadata Authoring Systems, which is best known for the product, ImageSnippets, which does metadata management for photos and other kinds of images. Welcome, Margaret. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Margaret: Hello! How are you doing? Yeah, it's a good introduction, thanks. Well, what I'd like to say about Metadata Authoring Systems is just that we want the most obscure images to be findable and easily accessible by describing and preserving them in the most precise ways possible. That's kind of what we try to do. One of the tools that we created is called ImageSnippets. It's been around for quite some time. ImageSnippets is, I think it can best be described as a way to take image description data itself and parse that into knowledge graphs, which is not something that people necessarily think of that much. It adds a whole new dimension to that content. You have an image, and what is the metadata that's attached to that image? How do you turn that metadata into a graph? Then, what can you do with that graph once you have it created? Larry: Yeah, no, that's super interesting too. A lot of people would back up from that. Like the use case, the end use case, it would be like, "Well, I want that picture of my daughter's 4th birthday party," or this specific product piece, or that famous Porsche engine manifold, the thing that you've example- Margaret: That I show that a lot. Larry: Exactly, yeah. Well, it sort of gets in, but I guess, I definitely want to focus on the use cases, but I think there's a few people, and even people who are versed in metadata from one perspective or another, may benefit from a bigger picture view of how you see the world of metadata. You come at it from image management in particular, but you're really a metadata strategist and management person at heart. Can you talk a little bit about what it is and why it's important? Margaret: Yeah. Well, I'll lead into this by talking a little bit about my background, because it helps to set the stage. I grew up with a photographer, my father was a photojournalist. In the 70s, he was working in a newspaper and I was growing up with this, and I was sort of the metadata person in the family without really understanding that exactly what it would lead to. I would go out and make photos. We were using Nikon film cameras then and everything, and we would go back to the dark room and develop the prints and everything. I would take these, I have a classic example that I used visually, but it's like I have the metadata written on the back of the photo. It's really cute. I was 10 years old, and it's like, Who's in the car? Where we were? Who took the picture? Who developed the picture? Who printed the picture? I even got into the administrative metadata. All this seemed important to me. Margaret: My mother used to write a little bit onto the slides and stuff a little bit, but somehow I just had this knack and I was very interested in this. Now, that continued on over the years because I've always also been an artist and a photographer and a technologist. I was in the Coast Guard and I was an electronics technician, and then I started working on computing systems and doing programming, and ultimately, had my own company doing hardware and networking support and building networks and deploying software solutions, lots of things. Then, I was trying to publish my images on the web and it's super interesting to me that the problem that I was trying to solve about publishing my images on the web almost 30 years ago is still, well, actually, I created a solution that solves it with ImageSnippets, but it's still something that is not really mainstream. Margaret: The entire vision that had to do with metadata and everything was sort of hijacked by the centralized companies that were just so data hungry and so ... well, engagement hungry rather like we want you to engage constantly, so we're going to make it increasingly easy for you to share your images as fast as you possibly can without thinking very carefully about the metadata aspect of what is in these images, why you're sharing it, why it's there. This is such a deep, deep, deep subject. Margaret: To answer your question about what is metadata, I often say that metadata really ultimately is data about anything that you're talking ... I can hold up this coffee cup and say, "Oh, I can describe the coffee cup. It's got flowers on it, the size of it, the shape of it, how warm it is, the temperature," anything that I really say about anything is metadata. But when it comes to, say, images that you're going to put on the web, and I like to narrow it down to images because that's really my forte, still images, but you can have, of course, metadata on PDF files and audio files and video files and everything can have metadata attached to it. Margaret: Inside of images, you can add headers and other types of information that would contain things like the EXIF data. A lot of people are very, very familiar with EXIF data, which is, that is the data that usually comes from hardware. That will come from a camera or it will come from a scanner or some piece of hardware that will say what the settings were. Sometimes it will give the GPS data, if you take an image with your smartphone,