Wednesday 27 May 2009

Image searching with Creative Commons

Student information literacy skills have been discussed on the blog before. In short, they are woeful. One area where students tend to have little understanding is in the area of intellectual property rights (IPR). The situation might be looking better for digital music, but in my experience it remains poor for other digital artefacts, particularly images. 'Twas only a few weeks ago while was in a lab with some undergraduate students for a web technologies module when I discovered most of them were ripping images from the web for inclusion within their information gateways. While this can (in some circumstances) be tolerated within the confines of an educational institution, it remains copyright infringement owing to copying by 'reprographic means' - and this isn't behaviour we want to become habitual in our graduates. My brother (a graphic designer and new media guru) has spun me many a yarn about ex-colleagues who have been shown their P45 for engaging in IPR theft (e.g. reusing someone's basic design or photograph).

All of this is veering away from the original reason for this blog though, which is to draw attention to some new image searching functionality on Yahoo! Image Search. Following on nicely from the Search Options post, the Yahoo! Search Blog has just announced the inclusion of some extra search filters for image result sets. Not only is it better than Google (and more accurate?), but it also includes a useful Creative Commons (CC) filter. Using a similar interface to Yahoo! Search Assist, Yahoo! Image Search allows users to apply a CC checkbox to filter for images, with specific filters included for commercial reuse and/or remixing. This is particularly useful to embellish those PowerPoint presentations or to illustrate a blog, or for those undergraduate students building an information gateway, or to avoid getting a P45!

There appears to be a downside, unfortunately. When I saw the Yahoo! Search Blog announcement I thought (perhaps naively) that Yahoo! was starting to put into practice its commitment to metadata, Semantic Web specifications, and other structured data. Since I know my personal homepage is indexed by Yahoo! and uses XHTML+RDFa to notify intelligent agents that its page content falls under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, I thought I'd put an Image Search to the test. Providing the CC namespace is referenced, the XHTML+RDFa required is simple. For example:

<p>Content on <a href="http://www.staff.ljmu.ac.uk/bsngmacg/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">George Macgregor</a>'s website is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License</a></p>

...and with specific CC reference to my foaf:depiction...

<img src="img/georgedepiction.jpg" alt="Image of George Macgregor" rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" property="foaf:depiction" content="George Macgregor"/>

My filtered CC search was unsuccessful though. This disappointed me; but then I observed the following notice:
"Note: Only Flickr images are supported currently."
Flickr – which is a subsidiary of Yahoo! – has allowed users to conduct advanced searches of its publicly uploaded images for quite some time. This has included CC searching. And it would appear that Yahoo! has integrated Flickr searching functionality into Image Search, albeit with some nice tweaks. If I had read their blog in its entirety I would have realised this; I just clicked the link such was my excitement about Yahoo! Image Search!

It's useful to have this functionality within a conventional searching tool, but it is disappointing that Image Search isn't using cleverer means of doing it (e.g. RDFa) rather than relying on the preferences of Flickr users when they upload their images. Don't get me wrong, this is useful and most welcome, and it will save me time on occasion, but it would be exciting to crack CC image searching beyond the controlled Flickr environment. Hopefully the 'currently' in "Only Flickr images are supported currently" will mean that my expectations will be met soon…
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2 comments:

  1. George Macgregor9 July 2009 at 19:29

    Once again Google are behind the other search engines on retrieval aids for users. Related to my blog on Yahoo! image searching by Creative Commons licence, Google have this evening announced similar image search functionality on the Official Google Blog. Google don't say exactly how they are doing it (perhaps similar to Yahoo!, they are using Picasa?). The fact that they state images "marked as CC" will be returned suggests they are either making use of RDFa or analysing text. However, the health warning would suggest the latter:

    "There's some fine print, of course. This feature identifies images that are tagged with licenses that authorize reuse. You'll still have to verify that the licensing information is accurate. We can help you take the first step towards finding these images, but we can't guarantee that the content we linked to is actually in the public domain, or available under the license."

    Enjoy!

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  2. George Macgregor9 July 2009 at 19:37

    I've just been experimenting with the Creative Commons image searching on Google and it appears to retrieve a broader range on images than Yahoo! (including images from Flickr), although the interface and filters aren't quite as good.

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