Margaret Warren
As a 10-year-old photographer, Margaret Warren would jot down on the back of each printed photo metadata about who took the picture, who was in it, and where it was taken.
Her interest in image metadata continued into her adult life, culminating the creation of ImageSnippets, a service that lets anyone add linked open data descriptions to their images.
We talked about:
her work to make images more discoverable with metadata connected via a knowledge graph
how her early childhood history as a metadata strategist, her background in computing technology, and her personal interest in art and a photography shows up in her product, ImageSnippets
her takes on the basics of metadata strategy and practice
the many types of metadata: descriptive, administrative, technical, etc.
the role of metadata in the new AI world
some of the good and bad reasons that social media platforms might remove metadata from images
privacy implications of metadata in social media
the linked data principles that she applies in ImageSnippets and how they're managed in the product's workflow
her wish that CMSs and social media platforms would not strip the metadata from images as they ingest them
the lightweight image ontology that underlies her ImageSnippets product
her prediction that the importance of metadata that supports provenance, demonstrates originality, and sets context will continue to grow in the future
Margaret's bio
Margaret Warren is a technologist, researcher and artist/content creator. She is the founder and CEO of Metadata Authoring Systems whose mission is to make the most obscure images on the web findable, and easily accessible by describing and preserving them in the most precise ways possible.
To assist with this mission, she is the creator of a system called, ImageSnippets which can be used by anyone to build linked data descriptions of images into graphs. She is also a research associate with the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition, one of the primary organizers of a group called The Dataworthy Collective and is a member of the IPTC (International Press and Telecommunications Council) photo-metadata working group and the Research Data Alliance charter on Collections as Data.
As a researcher, Margaret's primary focus is at the intersection of semantics, metadata, knowledge representation and information science particularly around visual content, search and findability. She is deeply interested in how people describe what they experience visually and how to capture and formalize this knowledge into machine readable structures. She creates tools and processes for humans but augmented by machine intelligence. Many of these tools are useful for unifying the many types of metadata and descriptions of images - including the very important context element - into ontology infused knowledge graphs. Her tools can be used for tasks as advanced as complex domain modeling but can also facilitate image content to be shared and published while staying linked to it's metadata across workflows.
Learn more and connect with Margaret online
LinkedIn
Patreon
Bluesky
Substack
ImageSnippets
Metadata Authoring Systems
personal and art site
IPTC links
IPTC Photo Metadata
Software that supports IPTC Photo Metadata
Get IPTC Photo Metadata
Browser extensions for IPTC Photo Metadata
Resource not mentioned in podcast
(but very useful for examining structured metadata in web pages)
OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer (OSDS)
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/pjoAAq5zuRk
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 21. Nowadays, we are all immersed in a deluge of information and media, especially images. The real value of these images is captured in the metadata about them. Without information about the history of an image, its technical details,
