mundell.org » Metadata

Google Mini doesn’t support XMP

Carrick — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 18:37:33 +0000

Recently, I corresponded with a Google engineer about XMP support in the Google Mini. At work we have a need for robust, finely-tuned search and retrieve capability leveraging Adobe’s XMP in PDF documents. I gave the engineer an example document tagged with custom metadata, explained how we’re currently using a solution which involves Windows Indexing Services, Adobe’s iFilter, and IFilterShop’s PDF+ iFilter to index PDF documents tagged with custom metadata, and VBscript/ASP/IIS for search and retrieval. (Our solution works but the relevance of our search results is mixed.) The engineer ran the example document through the Mini and it would appear that the Mini isn’t aware of XMP schemas and doesn’t support custom schemas, though they are going to consider it for a future release.

For the record, the Mini does support Dublin Core metadata within PDF files, which includes author, creator, subject, etc. The Google Mini looks like a tremendous value for small-scale indexing and searching.

Visualize this

Carrick — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 18:42:20 +0000

Findory has a new feature called “Neighbors” which attempts to visually represent a particular news site or blog’s closely related web brethren. Here’s a screen shot of this blog’s neighbors:

Fascinating. And everybody is doing it. Does this type of visual representation have a name?

Spotlight in OS X Tiger

Carrick — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 21:30:26 +0000

Spotlight, the up-and-coming search and retrieval system built into the next release of OS X, code name “Tiger,” is likely going to rock. It’s looking like Google Desktop Search on steroids. If you’re a metadata freak like me, Spotlight could be a savior for when your organizational system, if you have one, breaks down. Here’s what Apple is saying about it:

[Spotlight] will come with importers for a variety of common file formats. It will be able to import meta-data from JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF image files, MP3 and AAC audio files, QuickTime movies, PDF files, iChat histories, email, contacts, calendars, and more. If your application saves files in its own custom format, you’ll want to expose the meta-data from those files to users on the system through Spotlight. In order to do that, you need to provide a Spotlight Importer plug-in with your application. This consists of using the Spotlight Importer template in Xcode and implementing a single function that is bundled into a plug-in for the Spotlight system.

I’ve become quite a fan of Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) which provides a nice framework with which to tag PDF, JPEG, and other ubiquitous file formats with custom metadata. With XMP, I’ve been able to create a basic document cataloging system with search and retrieval functionality (more details about this at a later date.) It would be way cool if Spotlight supported XMP right out of the box, but even if it doesn’t, the plug-in capability makes it seem like support could be added without too much fuss. Can’t wait.

XMP

Carrick — Fri, 07 May 2004 21:25:27 +0000

So I’ve been diving headlong into XMP, Adobe’s extensisble metadata platform. It’s a sturctured tagging standard for inserting metadata into various file types, including PDF and JPEG, among others. I’ve been tasked by my employer with creating a simple document repository for publications and project reports. We’re focusing on PDF right now but it has possibilities for managing digital image assets.

I’ve worked out the process for adding XMP metadata to PDF documents, and I have installed an ifilter for Windows Indexing Services which, supposedly, extends Indexing Services to include XMP metadata in PDF docs. Now I need to create a simple web interface using ASP for querying the Index Server catalog for specific XMP metadata. No small task. I’m currently investigating the need to create custom data types and/or properties in Index Server itself, and/or the need to create a custom XML schema to extend the capapbility of the ifilter. And quite frankly, I have little idea of what I’m doing.