Palimpsest

Mike Linksvayer, May 4th, 2007

Terry Hancock, a frequent poster on the law-oriented cc-licenses list, is working on an interesting metadata library called Palimpsest:

[W]hich has a mnemonic association with what the program does, and does have a clever backronym for those who want one:
Python
Attribution &
Licensing
Information
Metadata
Processor, with
Systematic
Extensibility for
Sundry
Types

Terry’s goals for the project:

• Read/write support of Adobe XMP embedded metadata
• Read/write support of native “named field” data
• Read/write support of comments
• Read/write support of visible text labelling for formats that need it
• General adaptation to the 15 Dublin Core named fields for all data
• Discovery of attribution and licensing data in comments and annotations, if not available elsewhere
• License-aware processing (expansion of common abbreviations of terms, etc)
• Open-ended pluggable support for virtually any multimedia datatype
• Highly portable, so that it can be used on clients or servers on any operating system
• Dead-simple, so people will actually want to use it

I’m glad to see Terry tackling this project. It’ll be hard to get the abstractions right, but valuable if it works.

I love the project logo:

Not because it is a particularly great logo, but because it’s the first logo I’ve seen that could be mistaken for a captcha. Intentional or not, bound to be independently invented many times, and perhaps copied by me at least once.

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Summer of Code: “Indexing Embedded License Claims in Tracker”

Jason Kivlighn, April 14th, 2007

Hello all,

I’m Jason Kivlighn, a selected student for Google’s Summer of Code. Here’s the gist of my project:

Working under Creative Commons, I will extended the Tracker search and indexing engine to support the extraction of license claims. Because of the various forms that the license may take, I will build support based on the recommendations of Creative Commons, as outlined at http://creativecommons.org/technology/usingmarkup…
At the very least, the project will result in Tracker gaining support for indexing license claims embedding in MP3, OGG, PDF, HTML, and XML formats.

http://code.google.com/soc/cc/appinfo.html?csaid=1B2CE25E80A89A15

Now for a little about myself. I’m an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle majoring in Computer Engineering. I’ve been an Open Source enthusiast since I found Linux as a development platform about 6 years ago. I developed Krecipes for a few years and now am working on Sidestream, a network for artists to distribute their works. I like hacking together projects here and there as I see fit. My UW campus shortest route finder was a fun little project to settle the “What’s the fastest way from X to Y” disputes once-and-for-all.

My spring quarter is a hassle of Comp. Eng. studies and TA’ing for the ‘Programming Languages’ course; but as summer rolls around, I’ll be ready for a summer of hacking with Tracker and CC :-)

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XMP and open source article on Linux.com

Mike Linksvayer, April 11th, 2007

Nathan Willis writes about XMP making inroads in open source imaging software at Linux.com. Nice closing:

Take Creative Commons, for example, which has already embraced XMP, even providing custom XMP templates with which Photoshop users can add Creative Commons licensing information. The size of the collective CC-licensed works on the Internet far outscales any personal or corporate collection; who better to leverage that collection than the free software community?

See XMP on the CC developer wiki.

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