Intro

I’m Sean Gillies, a programmer at ISAW, the Institute for the Study of the
Ancient World at New York University. I’m part of the Digital Programs team,
which develops applications for researchers of ancient civilizations. Most of
my work is on a gazetteer and graph of ancient places called Pleiades. It
identifies and describes over 34,000 places in antiquity and makes them
editable on the web. A grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) running through April 2013 is allowing Pleiades to bulk up on
ancient world places and develop features that can support ambitious
applications like the digital classics network called Pelagios.

Background

In August of 2010, Dan Pett and Ryan Baumann suggested that we coin Flickr
machine tags in a "pleiades" namespace so that Flickr users could assert
connections between their photos and places in antiquity and search for photos
based on these connections. Ryan is a programmer for the University of
Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments and
collaborates with NYU and ISAW on Papyri.info. Dan works at the British
Museum and is the developer of the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s website:
finds.org.uk. At about the same time, ISAW had launched its Flickr-hosted
Ancient World Image Bank and was looking for ways to exploit these images,
many of which were on the web for the first time. AWIB lead Tom Elliott,
ISAW’s Associate Director for Digital Programs, and AWIB Managing Editor Nate
Nagy started machine tagging AWIB photos in December 2010. When Dan wrote "Now
to get flickr’s system to link back a la openplaques etc." in an email, we all
agreed that would be quite cool, but weren’t really sure how to make it happen.

As AWIB picked up steam this year, Tom blogged about the machine tags. His
post was read by Dan Diffendale, who began tagging his photos of cultural
objects to indicate their places of origin or discovery. In email, Tom and Dan
agreed that it would be useful to distinguish between findspot and place of
origin in photos of objects and to distinguish these from photos depicting the
physical site of an ancient place. They resolved to use some of the predicates
from the Concordia project, a collaboration between ISAW and the Center for
Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, London (now the Arts and
Humanities Research Institute), jointly funded by the NEH and JISC. For
findspots, pleiades:findspot=PID (where PID is the short key of a Pleiades
place) would be used. Place of origin would be tagged by pleiades:origin=PID.
A photo depicting a place would be tagged pleiades:depicts=PID. The original
pleiades:place=PID tag would be for a geographic-historic but otherwise
unspecified relationship between a photo and a place. Concordia’s original
approach was not quite RDF forced into Atom links, and was easily adapted to
Flickr’s "not quite RDF forced into tags" infrastructure.

I heard from Aaron Straup Cope at State of the Map (the OpenStreetMap annual
meeting) in Denver that he’d seen Tom’s blog post and, soon after, that it was
on the radar at Flickr. OpenStreetMap machine tags (among some others) get
extra love at Flickr, meaning that Flickr uses the machine tag as a key to
external data shown on or used by photo pages. In the OSM case, that means
structured data about ways ways and nodes, structured data that surfaces on
photo pages like http://flickr.com/photos/frankieroberto/3396068360/ as "St
George’s House is a building in OpenStreetMap." Outside Flickr, OSM
users can query the Flickr API for photos related to any particular way or
node, enabling street views (for example) not as a product, but as an
grassroots project. Two weeks later, to our delight, Daniel Bogan contacted Tom
about giving Pleiades machine tags the same kind of treatment. He and Tom
quickly came up with good short labels for our predicates and support for the
Pleiades machine tags went live on Flickr in the middle of November.

The Pleiades machine tags

Pleiades mainly covers the Greek and Roman world from about 900 BC – 600 AD. It
is expanding somewhat into older Egyptian, Near East and Celtic places, and
more recent Byzantine and early Medieval Europe places. Every place has a URL
of the form http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/$PID and it is these PID
values that go in machine tags. It’s quite easy to find Pleiades places through
the major search engines as well as through the site’s own search form.

The semantics of the tags are as follows:

pleiades:depicts=PID

The PID place (or what remains) is depicted in the photo

pleiades:findspot=PID

The PID place is where a photo subject was found

pleiades:origin=PID

The PID place is where a photo subject was produced

pleiades:where=PID

The PID place is the location of the photo subject

pleiades:place=PID

The PID place is otherwise related to the photo or its subject

At Pleiades, our immediate use for the machine tags is giving our ancient
places excellent portrait photos.

On the Flickr Side

Here’s how it works on the Flickr side, as seen by a user. When you coin a new,
never before used on Flickr machine tag like pleiades:depicts=440947682 (as
seen on AWIB’s photo Tombs at El Kab by Iris Fernandez), Flickr fetches the
JSON data at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/440947682/json in which the
ancient place is represented as a GeoJSON feature collection. A snippet of
that JSON, fetched with curl and pretty printed with python

  $ curl http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/440947682/json | python -mjson.tool

is shown here:

  {
    ...
    "id": "440947682",
    "title": "El Kab",
    "type": "FeatureCollection"
  }

[Gist: https://gist.github.com/1488270]

The title is extracted and used to label a link to the Pleiades place under the
photo’s "Additional info".

Flickr is in this way a user of the Pleiades not-quite-an-API that I blogged
about two weeks ago.

Flickr as external Pleiades editor

On the Pleiades end, we’re using the Flickr website to identify and collect
openly licensed photos that will serve as portraits for our ancient places. We
can’t control use of tags but would like some editorial control over images,
so we’ve created a Pleiades Places group and pull portrait photos from its pool.
The process goes like this:

We’re editing (in this one way) Pleiades pages entirely via Flickr. We get a kick
out of this sort of thing at Pleiades. Not only do we love to see small pieces
loosely joined in action, we also love not reinventing applications that already
exist.

Watch the birdie

This system for acquiring portraits uses two Flickr API methods:
flickr.photos.search and flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos. The guts of it
is this Python class:

  class RelatedFlickrJson(BrowserView):

      """Makes two Flickr API calls and writes the number of related
      photos and URLs for the most viewed related photo from the Pleiades
      Places group to JSON like

      {"portrait": {
         "url": "http://flickr.com/photos/27621672@N04/3734425631/in/pool-1876758@N22",
         "img": "http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2474/3734425631_b15979f2cd_m.jpg",
         "title": "Pont d'Ambroix by sgillies" },
       "related": {
         "url": ["http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:*=149492/"],
         "total": 2 }}

      for use in the Flickr Photos portlet on every Pleiades place page.
      """

      def __call__(self, **kw):
          data = {}

          pid = self.context.getId() # local id like "149492"

          # Count of related photos

          tag = "pleiades:*=" + pid

          h = httplib2.Http()
          q = dict(
              method="flickr.photos.search",
              api_key=FLICKR_API_KEY,
              machine_tags="pleiades:*=%s" % self.context.getId(),
              format="json",
              nojsoncallback=1 )

          resp, content = h.request(FLICKR_API_ENDPOINT + "?" + urlencode(q), "GET")

          if resp['status'] == "200":
              total = 0
              photos = simplejson.loads(content).get('photos')
              if photos:
                  total = int(photos['total'])

              data['related'] = dict(total=total, url=FLICKR_TAGS_BASE + tag)

          # Get portrait photo from group pool

          tag = "pleiades:depicts=" + pid

          h = httplib2.Http()
          q = dict(
              method="flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos",
              api_key=FLICKR_API_KEY,
              group_id=PLEIADES_PLACES_ID,
              tags=tag,
              extras="views",
              format="json",
              nojsoncallback=1 )

          resp, content = h.request(FLICKR_API_ENDPOINT + "?" + urlencode(q), "GET")

          if resp['status'] == '200':
              total = 0
              photos = simplejson.loads(content).get('photos')
              if photos:
                  total = int(photos['total'])
              if total < 1:
                  data['portrait'] = None
              else:
                  # Sort found photos by number of views, descending
                  most_viewed = sorted(
                      photos['photo'], key=lambda p: p['views'], reverse=True )
                  photo = most_viewed[0]

                  title = photo['title'] + " by " + photo['ownername']
                  data['portrait'] = dict(
                      title=title, img=IMG_TMPL % photo, url=PAGE_TMPL % photo )

          self.request.response.setStatus(200)
          self.request.response.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json')
          return simplejson.dumps(data)

[Gist: https://gist.github.com/1482469]

The same thing could be done with urllib, of course, but I’m a fan of httplib2.
Javascript on Pleiades place pages asynchronously fetches data from this view
and updates the DOM. The end result is a "Flickr Photos" section at the bottom
right of every place page that looks (when we have a portrait) like this:

We’re excited about the extra love for Pleiades places and can clearly see it
working. The number of places tagged pleiades:*= is rising quickly – up 50%
just this week – and we’ve gained new portraits for many of our well-known
places. I think it will be interesting to see what developers at Flickr, ISAW,
or museums make of the pleiades:findspot= and pleiades:origin= tags.

Thanks

We’re grateful to Flickr and Daniel Bogan for the extra love and opportunity to
blog about it. Work on Pleiades is supported by the NEH and ISAW. Our machine tag
predicates come from a NEH-JISC project – still bearing fruit several years later.