|
Meta Data Tools & CMS's & DAM's |
|
|
|
|
Written by Perpetual Art Machine
|
|
Wednesday, 26 July 2006 |
This discussion started here but I’m migrating it to this forum because it’s just as relative to [PAM] http://forum.phlooid.com/index.php?topic=31.0
[quote author=emagin link=topic=31.msg76#msg76 date=1145421453]
While we are on the subject of metatags, I recommend users of this great module to look at a couple of very interesting tools on the Joomla extensions site that really complement the cloud module.
When you start putting this stuff together it seems to really take the load and hassle out of managing the keywords and makes your life a lot easier, and the results of the cloud a lot better.
iJoomla Metatag Generator
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,396/Itemid,35/
Not perfect, some complaints about code quality, but damn, this is awesome. You can review all your content metatags, update them dynamically based on keywords, or just manually update them.
Related Items
I use the Related Items XTD bot a lot, and it is based on keywords. This tool helps a lot for managing metatag relationships, and helps you get a sense of how the cloud might look as you see repetitions.
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,192/Itemid,35/]http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,192/Itemid,35/[/url]
Meta Fly
I don't know this extension well yet, but it also dynamically adds metatags to your keywords based on some kind of word density of your content. Certainly worth a lookhttp://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,343/Itemid,35/]http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,343/Itemid,35/[/url]
Those were all great suggestions and the components mentioned above work great in Joomla. They are steps in the right direction but a comprehensive system has yet to surface.
Stephen of Phlooid http://phlooid.com has made something very cutting edge with Tag Cloud for the Joomla Community ([PAM] is using it right now). Arguably it’s huge and very important in many circles both commercially and academically. Tagging is a relatively new aspect of net culture and data management is the way of the future.
To go further, Folskonomy was a word invented about 5 minutes ago but describes in once facet a broad sense of how and where all this meta data generation and aggregation is leading to. There is a lot of initial research that has just begun on the larger issues of meta data. Currently the rush is on to define what kind of tools will help us find what we're looking for as the amount of available data grows exponentially by each minute.
see Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Out of Chaos by Bruce Sterling : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/view.html?pg=4
We've seen the impact and growth of web sites that sever up vast amount of data/media such as YouTube http://www.youtube.com and flickr.comhttp://www.flickr.com and so on. The effect is that everyone want to implement their own solution unique solution.....data mining, aggregation and searching is the last frontier, it's also a frontier with out limits, for obvious reasons stated earlier in reference to the amount of data produced.
Problem/Solution : Having locked into a CMS solution such as Joomla one benefits greatly by ease of use and speed in which content is authored constantly and evenly. A second benefit is that all/most CMS are database dependent, which means you can store and manipulate data and content in a countless number of ways, mastering a database your content becomes infinitely malleable. The down side is that it is locked into a database as opposed to being hard coded into plain old html and there needs to be a number of solutions created to fit your platform that allows searching on a meta data basis. Tag Cloud, Meta Tag Generator are excellent first steps.
Moving on to the topic of contents or rather "assets" such as media i.e. photos, videos, audio files and so on, one can benefit greatly in terms of organization and aggregation by using a DAM system such as Gallery2 or an aggregator such as Loudblog and so on. It seems as if a new DAM (Digital Asset Management) is brought to market every day. They just as hot as a CMS and are great solutions but they suffer the same down falls as a CMS and that is your real content i.e the data you want to perform a search on is locked into a database, that is until a component or tools is made to dive into the database and make it available for humans and non-humans to find. Until more recently most DAM and CMS have focused mainly on organization and mass storage and built in searching tools have in most cases been an after thought.
CMS and DAM embedding is a match made in “website heaven”. Components such as the Joomla/Gallery2 Bridge http://opensource.4theweb.nl/ are the next logical step. As great as they work they do fall short on searching tools and meta data generation/aggregation. In my opinion the embedding solutions to date are just short of the old MAMBO/Joomla “wrapper”.
Gallery2 has been around for ages and is arguably the king of the heap in free open source DAMS. It's short comings have always been aggregation of assets outside of the Gallery2 DAM system as well at meta data generation and retrieval. In this instance I speak of meta data beyond EXIF and flat keywords and description. The problem is that unless you take hours to input massive amounts of keywords your assets are mostly likely only retrievable by yourself the person who organized that DAM. Not surprisingly, tagging and meta data generation has been one of the most requested features in the Gallery2 forms but very little has been done about it. A rather quick a
easy (but much welcomed) implementation of a flickr style or Folksonomic tagging module was quietly released in this forum. http://gallery.menalto.com/node/38478. It works great and is a step in the right direction as it allows visitors to "tag" the assets found in Gallery2, the "tags" are then displayed with the assets and also searchable via the Gallery2 search engine.
Now here's the wrap up and dream solution. A really great thing to do would be to link up Stephan's Meta Cloud with Gallery2 to display the keywords, descriptions, titles, and the "tag" hack fields in the Gallery2 database. The icing on the cake would allow the Meta Tag Generator component read and edit these Gallery2 fields and thus allowing Tag Cloud to read from a more meaningful and larger set of data.
Trackback(0)
 |
|
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 26 July 2006 )
|
![video art [PAM] logo](http://www.perpetualartmachine.com/templates/corp/images/video_art_pam_20.jpg)
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
