One of the things I’ve noticed with my Image Region stuff, which I posted about recently, is that it’s slow. I didn’t really think about why: at first, a lot of it seemed to have to do with the client side XSL, or the CSS cropping of gigantic images.<\/p>\n
However, I’m now realizing that this is using a regex with a pretty heavy query: The kind of query that I wouldn’t want anyone to run against julie, because it would just take too long.<\/p>\n
The reason for this is Redland’s current REGEX implementation: It basically loads all the literals out of the store and does a regex against them after it has them, which is obviously not ideal.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, I tried to think of interesting queries which could be done without requiring a regex, and came up with the idea of flickr images searches: show me a closeup of all the regions in a flickr image of mine.<\/p>\n
So, now there’s an additional search box on my SPARQL interface: Flickr ID\/URI. It then uses the foaf:page part of the photo to query against, which is obviously much faster.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’ll expand this: let people put in any flickr photo ID, and display the information using XSLT against an RDF datasource, with a link to the output of the datasource. I’ve got all the tools to do it now running in Python locally, so I don’t think it would be too difficult: I would need to get some error parsing together though. I really wish I could tie PHP \/ Python code on the web together more easily though…<\/p>\n
Anyway, an example: Flickr Page<\/a> to RDF generates Regions<\/a>.<\/p>\n