SVG::Metadata 0.28 Released
While many people these days are switching to annotation-in-XHTML, there’s still at least one file format out there which has extremely useful metadata annotation using RDF/XML inside the document: SVG.
The Scalable Vector Graphcs format has a Metadata element, which is expected to contain RDF/XML. This is great news for people who might wish to create a directory of SVG images: the metadata can be stored in the actual images, something that the Open Clip Art Library takes advantage of, using a number of tools to extract statistics and aggregate metadata from SVG files.
To take an example from the library, Autos_01.svg (SVG file, requires SVG viewer) contains 23 RDF statements. These triples are given a base of a cc:Work with the URL of the file of itself, meaning that a simple query about the predicates and objects with http://openclipart.org/clipart/transportation/autos_01.svg as a subject returns the important aspects of this document. This includes description, creator, keywords, and license. The license is “Public Domain” — adding the images to the Open Clip Art Library requires placing them into the Public Domain.
For working with this data, developers of the project created the Perl module SVG::Metadata – a module for annotating SVG files with this metadata, as well as making change to the metadata which already exists in such files.
The maintainer just announced on the Clipart Discussion list that he has released 0.28, which includes the changes from previous releases 0.26 and 0.27 which were mostly maintenance releases. (The message will eventually appear in the August threads, but hasn’t yet.)
The RDF generation in versions prior to 0.24 was broken, but was fixed in the 0.25 release – OCAL is now using this release in their scripts, so many of the more recent images in the library are valid RDF, meaning that you can simply pass it to Redland with the http://feature.librdf.org/raptor-scanForRDF feature set. In the Python bindings, that is:
p.set_feature(”http://feature.librdf.org/raptor-scanForRDF”, “1″)
In rapper:
[crschmidt@creusa ~]$ rapper -c -f scanForRDF=1 http://www.openclipart.org/incoming/cat_scrathing_post_benji_01.svg
rapper: Parsing URI http://www.openclipart.org/incoming/cat_scrathing_post_benji_01.svg
rapper: Parsing returned 30 statements
I think this is a great example of how to work with structured metadata without dealing with the crappy aspects of RDF/XML syntax corner cases: simply write a library which parses the metadata, fills your variables up, and lets you modify them with a standard API, then lets you resync the data to the file. Congrats to Bryce for his hard work on the module, and on making the metadata for these SVG files accurate and useful to external users.