Exiv2

I took a look through the exiv2 code, and if I am not mistaken, what would be needed are changes in properties.cpp

I've attached a file with what I think might work, though there are actually 175 tags in DwC. Can someone take a look and comment?

One thing I am not at all clear about are the 3rd, 4th, and 5th fields. how are they determined?

For example:

"Text",        xmpText,          xmpExternal,
           "Integer",     signedLong,       xmpInternal,

Alan

Thanks for posting the request and the code. As you know, it's Thanksgiving in the States, so I'm busy this weekend with family matters. If another team member doesn't respond about your code, I will take a look one evening after work next week.

Thanks also for reporting a bug against Phatch about DwC. As Phatch uses Exiv2, DwC is not supported. Sadly, I think Phatch is no longer an active project. My wife and I went to visit Stani and Nele in Amsterdam a couple of years ago at Thanksgiving and he was very busy with his business and they were expecting their first baby. All open source projects need a human dynamo to keep them alive and without Stani driving it forward, it hasn't moved much in the last couple of years. This is a real pity because the concept of Phatch is wonderful. It's a platform for Photo Processing. It doesn't compete with PhotoShop or Lightroom - it does something they don't even attempt. If you know any strong python people, encourage one to pick up the torch of Phatch. I'll help.

I'm not aware of DwC. Can you say a little more about the business case to support this? What's special about biodiversity information that requires metadata not already serviced by the supported standards of Exif, IPTC and xmp?

Happy Turkey Day.

Robin

Cheers, Robin

Thanks for taking a look on a holiday! Regarding the business case for DwC, it is specialized, but provides quite a lot of data that would otherwise be kept in a separate database rather then in the image metadata.

The specific project I am involved in is a wildlife camera trap project in the Amazon. They have 55,000 photos taken over the last several years.

There are 170 specialized tags in the DwC standard, some highly relevant ones for this project are:

-RecordBasisOfRecord - human observation? photo?
-EventHabitat - jungle? swamp?
-OccurrenceEstablishmentMeans - how did the animal get there, is it native to the area? introduced?
-OccurrenceBehavior - what is the animal doing
-OccurrenceIndividualCount - how many animals appear in the photo
-OccurrenceIndividualID - if the animal can be uniquely identified
-OccurrenceLifeStage - adult, juvenile
-OccurrenceSex - male, female
-TaxonScientificName - Scientific name of the animal
-TaxonVernacularName - Common names for the animal

As you can see, not relevant to your typical photographer, but very import for researches cataloging species and biodiversity.

The fill list is here: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm

Thanks again,
Alan

Alan

That's interesting. I can see the value of that information in the photo. Keeping the data with the image makes sense. I wish more applications (such as Preview.app) copied all the metadata when they exported or scaled images.

I've never sat on a standards committee, however a standard should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate use beyond the direct commercial interest of the committee members. Photos from a space craft, or a church outing, or even Turkey Trot 10Ks have specialized fields. The world (and Exiv2) doesn't need different standards for every conceivable image as this amounts to anywhere you can look in the Universe. When multiplied by the myriad of data representations (xml, JSON, CSV etc). It's easier to create chaos than order - the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Thanks for providing an explanation and the code. This will get attention.

Robin

Jim and Alan

Thanks for logging Issue# 937 about this matter. I'll continue the conversation there: http://dev.exiv2.org/issues/937

Robin

Hi folks

Just wondering if anyone has had a chance to look over the patch I added to http://dev.exiv2.org/issues/937 ?

In my testing it works without causing problems elsewhere, but there are likely test cases I have missed.

Alan