I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at the fascinating ISKO Content Architecture Conference.

On Monday I gave a presentation on, "Still Digital Images - the hardest things to classify and find."
My presentation looked at the image market and the ways in which images can be annotated - or is that processed, classified, categorized, tagged, keyworded… We need a controlled vocabulary to controlled the vocabulary of controlled vocabulary! 

I then went on to raise some of the challenges of image organization and retrieval - picking out the need to consider different image domains and user groups, and considering how to provide users with access to basic attributes, depicted content and abstract concepts linked to images.

There were some amazingly interesting presentations over the two days of this event.

Highlights for me included a great keynote from David Crystal looking at the evolution of the linguistic approach to content analysis.  Madi Solomon highlighted the challenges faced by Disney and Pearson in the management of content using metadata.  Charles Inskip opened my mind to music categorization and sale, and the many similarities with image retrieval and organization.  Also, intriguing was the work showcased by the BBC's Tom Scott, who spoke about 'Building Coherence at bbc.co.uk'

As always at these events, interesting posters and presentations abounded, and this blog can only give a flavour of them.

If you want to know more, the organizers have made abstracts available online, and in some cases full papers.  They also plan to make the slides of individual presentations available along with recorded audio.  I'm told the full set of resources will be on the conference website in the next few weeks.

Next week I'm at a Digital Asset Management (DAM) conference in London talking about "Tagging Images for Findability: making your DAM system work for you."  More about that next week.

Ian