Structure of the Intellectual Genre filed in the IPTC Template

[Bob Hendricks]

It is highly desirable that the Intellectual Genre field of the IPTC Template be a structured vocabulary in exactly the same manner as the Subject/Keywords data entry field.

[Kirk Baker]

Bob,

It is highly desirable that the Intellectual Genre field of the IPTC Template be a structured vocabulary in exactly the same manner as the Subject/Keywords data entry field.

Do you mean that you want the Structured Keywords panel to be allowed to add items/paths to that field?

-Kirk

[Bob Hendricks]

Yes.  Right now if I want to use a controlled vocabulary for the image genre, the only place it can be entered is in Keywords which allows either individual keywords or a controlled voice structure. It would be really handy if one could use a controlled/structured vocabulary in the Genre filed in exactly the same way.

[Bob Hendricks]

Here are a couple of examples of my thinking.

The first is an example of a structured vocabulary of world regions. The vocabulary comes from Dave Riecks CVKC web site.  The prewritten structured vocabulary is loaded into the PM vocabulary in the standard way--select structured vocabularies at the Keyword entry point in the IPTC template, press load on the popup screen, follow the path to the desired endpoint, click on the add path button to enter the data into the collection, press apply and the data are moved, with separators, into the Keywords entry field in the template.  It works like a charm with one exception (that is not a deal breaker, but probably should be fixed). That is that the implementation only allows three levels in the structure.  This should be increased to four or five (max).

The second screenshot shows exactly the same structure, other than that I have used a vocabulary for photographic genres. Although one can indeed enter the information into keywords, and (I expect that) PM 6 Plus will catalog this information correctly, there is an IPTC entry for this information (Intellectual Genre). It is true that one could enter these data into the keywords and then cut and past from keywords to genre.  But it would be so much nicer if the Intellectual Genre entry behaved exactly like the Keywords entry.  Have two entries--one where we enter data exactly as it is now, and one where we can enter data from a structured vocabulary, just like in Keywords.

As an aside, the Library of Congress (LOC) has developed a new classification and cataloging system called FAST.  Here is the reference:

Chan, Lois Mae and O'Niell, Edward T., FAST: Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited (2010).

In FAST one has seven facets by which metadata can be classified. The IPTC Keywords field matches the facet Topical Headings; IPTC Intellectual Genres matches the FAST facet Form and Genre. The first image above, although entered into IPTC Keywords, really fits the FAST Geographical facet.

Implementing a structured vocabulary entry for Intellectual Genre would make our IPTC Template consistent with one of the seven facets.  This would be a great start. But, as the first image shows, the location information in a structured vocabulary does not play nice with the current way of entering the data into the template in that there is a separate entry field for each level in the location.  It would be a lot of work, I expect, to change that entry and so is best left alone for now.

I would be most interested in a discussion of the interest in/need for more capabilities in structured vocabulary in the IPTC template.

[carlseibert]

Hi Bob,

Whoa. There is already a controlled vocabulary for Intellectual Genre. True, the standard allows for the use of the field with CVs other than the IPTC's own. But this is meant to be a machine-readable field and the machines that read it (such as they are) are expecting IPTC values in the field, so that pretty much means the IPTC CV is the CV for this field. It's always risky to put data where it might not be expected, in a form that might not be expected, or to stray from the standard in general. I would be more comfortable not having my data in a place where it might be stomped on - or ignored - by some unfeeling machine down the road.

A bit of background - the Subject Code and Intellectual Genre fields were introduced some twenty years ago, meant to replace the Category and Supp Cat fields. But nobody noticed. Everybody kept on using Cat and Supp Cat. ("Everybody" in this case meaning news services and publishers. That's everybody, right?) While I'm sure that some folks have adopted these fields by now, basically they are places that most folks don't go.

There are other metadata standards apart from IPTC. But IPTC is really what we've got for embedded descriptive metadata for photos. The IPTC standard started out designed for the news industry. (And news services still pay the freight for its development and upkeep.) So there are some fields and features that are industry-specific. We just have to work around some of that furniture.

As an exercise, I did make a CV for Photo Mechanic's Structured Keywords dialog to generate Subject Codes. There is a Subject Code generator online, but I reasoned that photographers who might actually need such a thing might be not able to connect to the net when they needed it. So I built this little tool. (Screenshot below)  Just drill down and copy the resulting code and paste it where ever you want it -in a template, presumably. Works like a charm. You could do the same with Intellectual Genres. (This was just an excerise. Exactly nobody has asked me for the Sub Code CV. Real world, if there's anybody out there who uses this field, they have the relevant codes on a sticky label attached to their laptop.)

Here's the standard for Intellectual Genre:    https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata#intellectual-genre

And here's the CV:  http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/

I tend to think that you can accomplish what you want in the Keywords field. Remember that hierarchical structure is only a tool for markup. When we go to retrieve the data, regardless of the field, we just use Booleans, which don't care about hierarchies. They (re-)build them on the fly.
-Carl

[Bob Hendricks]

Carl:

Thanks for your detailed and interesting discussion. I greatly appreciate your thoughts.

The problem, at least for me, arises because I am not a news media photographer. Rather, I come more from a Library of Congress (LOC) and Visual Resources of America (VRA) background. However, their classification and cataloging systems are oriented for a very different use that managing private digital image collections.  Although there is a recent modification to the LOC system and the VRA has published their VRA Core, nether has been implemented in a form suitable for photographers who manage private collections and  PCs. The IPTC is the best we have. Of course, many photographers use Lightroom. Personally, I much prefer Photo Mechanic--it just seems so much more intuitive and logical to me.

Your point that it is dangerous to put data into IPTC fields that are non-standard is well-taken. But on the other hand, for those of us who do not deal with agencies that require information in the IPTC format, it is not unreasonable to use some of the fields in a non-standard way.  To put intellectual genre information that matches more closely the LOC standards into Keywords is counter-intuitive.

If CameraBits is marketing PM primarily to those working in the media then the points I raise are irrelevant and my suggestions can be ignored. But, If their market is also those of us from other, or no particular, background(s) and perspective(s), then perhaps we need to find a simple solution that is easy to implement and gives both sides an opportunity to use a great product without any significant effort on the part of the development team.

With these thoughts in mind here is one such suggestion, although I am sure there are other ideas as well.

Why not provide an opportunity in the PM Preferences to  either (1) label the IPTC Template as custom or non-standard and not for commercial use for interchange of metadata, or (2) to change the title of the template to My Template or some such. If the IPTC standard input is left as it now is in the template, then adding a CV to , for example, the Genre with nothing but an asterisk indicating that  this form is not standard for IPTC, we have the best of both worlds. One could go a step further and if the user were to select a non-standard template in the preferences, only then would be the non-standard CV be implemented.

I would very much like to see some discussion of this topic.  If I am way off base, I am happy to find work-arounds in PM to meet my needs and not badger either the forum or the great staff at CameraBits with my non-standard ideas. However, if there is interest, I would be happy to be an active part of the discussion.

BuIn closing, I really believe that some attempt to meet either the VRA or the LOC FAST metadata formats would be very valuable to a large market. CameraBits is in the best position of any developer I know to capitalize on this market.

Regards,

Bob

[carlseibert]

I once had a nice email chat with the led maintainer of VRA, took a look at the standard and sadly haven't done much with it since. So my impressions here may be a bit fuzzy. (VRA, for those following along, is a metadata standard meant for fine art works.)

VRA aims at a much narrower market than IPTC, which is applicable to more or less anything. As I remember, VRA has some XMP fields of its own, but most of it can be/is successfully mapped to IPTC fields. Because if you make a standard without software support for reading it, you've got a bad case of one hand clapping. So, mapping VRA fields to IPTC fields is pretty smart. (Kind of like what you are doing now with Intellectual Genre on a one-off basis, actually.) Thanks to the ubiquity of IPTC, average people can be expected to read those fields and the data will survive.

By doing that I think the VRA avoided going off the rails like the Creative Commons people did. The CC folks made up a bunch of XMP fields that nobody supports or is likely to support, which was ultimately worse than a waste. Everything they wanted to do can be done just fine in the IPTC standard, but now there doesn't seem to be any impetus to do so. I once wote a probably way too long blog post about this.

It's a needle to thread. If you stay close enough to what the fields are expected to do, there may be some head-scratching, but the meaning will get through and you get what you need in your own collection. Frankly, I think if a human being reads your "hacked" IG field, he or she will figure out the point. And it is true that the standard doesn't say you can't use whatever CV you want. So, I guess you aren't technically outside the standard. I just worry because of the weirdness surrounding that field in general.

Whether a given bit of data needs its own field is kind of a deep discussion. Personally, I think it mostly comes down to whether or not you are going to need to search with one field against the other. Consider the Caption vs Keywords.  And how many times users actually need to decouple them and search one against the other. Not that many, in my experience. Despite the fact that those two fields are really designed to be used against each other. That suggests to me that we have pretty darned broad latitude in what we store in Keywords and the Caption. Now, when you do need a separate field, you really need it. That's a fact. Consider the mess we'd be in if we didn't have Creator and the location fields to sort out the jumble of stuff that's in Caption and keywords. So, if Intellectual Genre is saving your bacon by all means go with it. I once kind of stretched Source a little for this very reason and I'm still here to tell the story.

I do think it would be cool if Photo Mechanic could one day have separate metadata dialogs for different standards, like VRA or maybe PRISM(?) That would be IF there was a big enough market and broad enough support to make it worthwhile. But therein lies the rub. Is there enough desire out there in the market to make multiple standards profitable for a bunch of developers? We're having enough trouble getting everybody to play noice with just the one. Considering how stupid complex metadata is, I think Kirk and his crew have an awfully full plate as it is.

[Bob Hendricks]

All:

I have spent considerable time thinking about Carl's comments and have gone back and read the IPTC Metadata User Guide. I have come away from this study firmly in agreement with Carl that we do not want to stray from the IPTC standard. To this end, I have found a few small inconsistencies between the standard and the IPTC template in PM 6, which I will discuss in a separate posting. However, regarding the Intellectual Genre, I looked up the IPTC definition in the IPTC Photo Metadata User's Guide.  Here is what I found:

Intellectual Genre: "Globally unique identifier for controlled terms to describe the genre of the photo. The IPTC Genre vocabulary may be used http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre or other genre vocabularies more focused on photography."

The referenced IPTC CV is  the standard Carl refers to in his discussion. It is long and appears to be a single entry into the IG Tag rather than a hierarchical CV.

However, the definition explicitly allows other CV genre vocabularies. For example, one could use the CV managed by David Reicks, but the definition also leaves room for something else that could be developed by other groups or maybe even by individuals for private use. Such CVs are likely to be hierarchical as is that from Reicks.

With this in mind, I still believe that the (hopefully minor) modification that would allow hierarchical CVs for the Intellectual Genre tag is a valid suggestion.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Bob

[Bob Hendricks]

All:

As a continuation of this discussion, I have examined the IPTC Metadata Field Reference Table and compared it with the Photo Mechanic IPTC Template. The details of my findings are presented in the attached note. Consistent with Carl's comments above, I agree that the PM Template should conform to the IPTC standard tightly. To this end, it is suggested that a few deprecated fields in the standard be removed from the template, while several fields present in the standard but which are missing in the Template be added to it.

Comments? Discussion?

Bob Hendricks

[Kirk Baker]

Bob,

We won't be removing any fields.  Many of our customers rely on them for existing images.  If you don't want them, please customize your Metadata layouts to remove them.

Regarding table 2, specifically the Artwork or Image structure: Photo Mechanic currently has all of those fields.  We have abbreviated them but they're present.

PM Field Names	IPTC Specification Field Names
Circa Date Created	Circa Date Created
Content Desc	Content Description
Contribution Desc	Contribution Description
© Notice	Copyright Notice
Creators	Creator
Creator IDs	Creator ID
© Owner ID	Current Copyright Owner ID
© Owner Name	Current Copyright Owner Name
Licensor ID	Current Licensor ID
Licensor Name	Current Licensor Name
Date Created	Date Created
Physical Desc	Physical Description
Source	Source
Src Inventory Num	Source Inventory Number
Src Inventory URL	Source Inventory URL
Style Periods	Style Period
Title	Title

We do support "Image Registry Entry" -- we call it "Image Registry Entries" and all three fields are supported: "Registry Organization Identifier", "Registry Image Identifier", and "Registry Entry Role".

We don't support "CV-Term About Image".
We don't support "Person Shown in the Image with Details".
We don't support "Product Shown in the Image".
We don't support "Digital Image GUID" -- it is a rather poorly defined specification, difficult to meet its demands.
We don't support "Genre" -- it's another CV-Term structure.
We don't support "Image Region" -- it's a structure of structures and would require an entirely different way of editing and displaying it.

As for re-purposing Intellectual Genre for your own needs: you're welcome to do whatever you want with it, but be aware that others won't be using it that way.  If your metadata is only going to be consumed by you, then there is no harm in it.  I do not think that we will make it easy to use the Structured Keywords panels to populate Intellectual Genre, however.  And Catalog won't be displaying Intellectual Genre in a way that will show paths as sub-trees like it does for Keywords.

If a standards body (IPTC org) adopts the LOC FAST, then we'll consider adding it.

-Kirk

[Bob Hendricks]

Hi Kirk:

Thanks for your comments.  Indeed, we can make some (any) of the fields invisible.  I will likely do that to reduce the total size of the Template to something that fits my needs.

With regard to the Artwork or Object, I have a problem finding some of the fields you say are present.  When I look in the table in PM, I find Title, Creators, Creator ID, Date Created, Circa Date Created, Style Periods.  then I get a long, white blank space as I scroll to the right.  If I scroll far enough, I find Phys. Desc.  Sorry, I messed this one. Then there are 10 fields with no entries.

If I press + to add a field, I get Default in each of the above labeled fields, but the 10 blank fields now have an entry of ERROR.  Is this where some of the entries from my list of things that were missing are supposed to go?

incientlayyh, in this table, there are four rows displayed--a row of headings and three rows where we can add data. however, box in which these rows are shown, the box is a bit higher than the four rows and there appears to be a button in the lower left corner.  Is this a button that we are supposed to have access to, or is the box a bit too big?  Same thing for the Location Shown Box.

Bob

[Kirk Baker]

Bob,

Thanks for your comments.  Indeed, we can make some (any) of the fields invisible.  I will likely do that to reduce the total size of the Template to something that fits my needs.

With regard to the Artwork or Object, I have a problem finding some of the fields you say are present.  When I look in the table in PM, I find Title, Creators, Creator ID, Date Created, Circa Date Created, Style Periods.  then I get a long, white blank space as I scroll to the right.  If I scroll far enough, I find Phys. Desc.  Sorry, I messed this one. Then there are 10 fields with no entries.

If I press + to add a field, I get Default in each of the above labeled fields, but the 10 blank fields now have an entry of ERROR.  Is this where some of the entries from my list of things that were missing are supposed to go?

It sounds like the table still isn't working correctly for you.  It should not be doing any of that oddness.

Incidentally, in this table, there are four rows displayed--a row of headings and three rows where we can add data. however, box in which these rows are shown, the box is a bit higher than the four rows and there appears to be a button in the lower left corner.  Is this a button that we are supposed to have access to, or is the box a bit too big?  Same thing for the Location Shown Box.

Can you please post a screen shot that illustrates this problem?  Use the 'Attachments and other options' link when you're composing your reply to this message and there you'll be able to upload your JPEG format screenshot.

Thanks,

-Kirk

[Bob Hendricks]

Kirk:

Here are three screen shots of the Models, Prosperities, and Artwork Section.

First, let me note that the issue of the little bar at the bottom is resolved.  It is the slider that allows you to scroll across the box.  However, the size of the box is somewhat inconsistent in terms of how it loads each time I access the Template.  When I wrote the last note, this little bar was almost covered completely by the third (empty) row of data and you could not move it; this evening, it is pretty much uncovered, it is obvious what it is, and it works fine.  Only thing needed here is to make sure that it is always visible--seems like a simple little thing associated with the size of the box in which the table is placed.

Re the three screen shots:

1. the first is with the scroll bar placed about 35% of the way along from left to right
2. the second is with the scroll bar about 80% of the way to the right.  Everything is white in the top row in between the first and second images.
3. the last is with the scroll bar all the way to the right. There are 10 fields with ERROR in the second row.

Just to be sure we are on the same page regarding my Table 2.  These are the only fields that I cannot find in my copy of the Template. So, for example, in the list of fields that you list  that are present, indeed, I see all of those in your list that are NOT in my Table 2.

It is interesting to note that there are 10 fields in my Artwork table that I cannot see (see my Table 2)  and there are 10 fields in the right-hand part of the Artwork table that all show Error as in my attached screenshots.  Is it so simple that in fact, when you find the problem with the fields, the 10 missing entries will all appear?  If we are so lucky, then everything under Artwork or Object detail in my Table 2 is resolved.

Please advise if you need additional information.

[Bob Hendricks]

Just a quick addendum to my post.  There are 16 fields associated with Artwork or Objects. I can see 6 of these in my Template and, per my Table 2 in this discussion, 10 are missing. If I go to the Browse/Filter features of the Catalog, you are allowing searches on 9 of these variables. Of these 9, several are variables that are listed in my Table 2 of missing data under discussion. It is thus clear that the issue is really one of how the Artwork table shows up in the template, and not in the database.

Of these 16 variables, you do not search on 7. Of these, there are a couple that would be very helpful to have:  Date Created and/or Circ Date Created; and Source Inventory Number. 

If one photographs artwork in a museum, as I do regularly for academic purposes, when I prepare lectures I often need to find works from various dates. Sometimes I can get the correct image from the Style Period, but often a specific date is required.

With regard to Inventory Number,  I almost always photograph the artwork caption which almost always gives the museum catalog/inventory number. Sometimes you need to be able to find an image by this number--for example, Monet painted the same scene many times (e.g., the cathedral at Rouen; his haystacks; his water lilies).  To sort out a particular image from one these sets, you may need to sort by Inventory number as most of these paintings are in different galleries. 

Any chance you would consider adding at least one of the dates and the Source Inventory to the searchable list?

Bob

[Kirk Baker]

Here are three screen shots of the Models, Properties, and Artwork Section.

First, let me note that the issue of the little bar at the bottom is resolved.  It is the slider that allows you to scroll across the box.  However, the size of the box is somewhat inconsistent in terms of how it loads each time I access the Template.  When I wrote the last note, this little bar was almost covered completely by the third (empty) row of data and you could not move it; this evening, it is pretty much uncovered, it is obvious what it is, and it works fine.  Only thing needed here is to make sure that it is always visible--seems like a simple little thing associated with the size of the box in which the table is placed.

Re the three screen shots:

1. the first is with the scroll bar placed about 35% of the way along from left to right
2. the second is with the scroll bar about 80% of the way to the right.  Everything is white in the top row in between the first and second images.
3. the last is with the scroll bar all the way to the right. There are 10 fields with ERROR in the second row.

Just to be sure we are on the same page regarding my Table 2.  These are the only fields that I cannot find in my copy of the Template. So, for example, in the list of fields that you list  that are present, indeed, I see all of those in your list that are NOT in my Table 2.

It is interesting to note that there are 10 fields in my Artwork table that I cannot see (see my Table 2)  and there are 10 fields in the right-hand part of the Artwork table that all show Error as in my attached screenshots.  Is it so simple that in fact, when you find the problem with the fields, the 10 missing entries will all appear?  If we are so lucky, then everything under Artwork or Object detail in my Table 2 is resolved.

What build are you running?  Is it the updated build I gave you?

Thanks,

-Kirk