Tracker CC Indexing

Google Summer of Code Project: “Indexing Embedded License Claims in Tracker”

Here's some relevant (now revised) sections of the Summer of Code application:

Timeline

Here's a conservative timeline. I expect to get more done; as actual coding begins, I'll update this with more accurate estimates.

http://www.google.com/calendar/images/ext/gc_button1_en.gif

By week 2: Write an XMP parser. Tracker includes examples of parsing XML using glib which I will also follow as a guide. (Based on recommendations/specifications at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/XMP)

By week 4: Add support to Tracker to automatically read and index XMP sidecar files, which will take advantage of the XMP parser. (Done by modifying src/trackerd/tracker-metadata.c)

By week 5: Once Tracker indexes the metadata of independent XMP sidecar files, I will go about extending the extractors of various formats to index embedded XMP metadata. Again, the above XMP parser will be utilized. Primary formats include HTML, SVG, and PDF.

By week 7: Write a parser for RDFa for relevant formats. (Based on recommendations/specifications at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/RDFa)

By week 9: Put the RDFa parser to use

By week 11: Additionally add support for new formats, such as SMIL and RSS. As time permits, I may also extract metadata from other image formats such as TIFF, PNG, and GIF (all of which could contain XMP metadata). Formats that take advantage of previously written code may take only a day, while others may take up to a week.

By week 12: Tie things up for submission of code

Implementation

Formats to support:

 * MP3
 * OGG
 * RSS
 * SVG
 * HTML
 * JPEG
 * PDF
 * SMIL

With the exception of MP3, OGG, and RSS, all of the above formats embed information as XMP. This relieves the burden of processing such a wide variety of formats.

XMP/RDF and RDFa:

Probably the most significant portion of the work done will be processing of XML XMP data. Once the XML data is extracted, it will be passed to a shared piece of code that indexes each field independent of it's format.

The following is an except of raw XMP describing a work licensed under the CC Attribution 3.0 license.

<?xpacket begin= id=?>
 ...
 <rdf:Description rdf:about=
  xmlns:dc='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'>
  <dc:rights>
   <rdf:Alt>
    <rdf:li xml:lang='x-default' >This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
 Attribution 3.0 License.</rdf:li>
   </rdf:Alt>
  </dc:rights>
 </rdf:Description>
 <rdf:Description rdf:about=
  xmlns:cc='http://web.resource.org/cc/'>
  <cc:license rdf:resource='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/'/>
 </rdf:Description>
 ...
<?xpacket end='r'?>

To fit Tracker's metadata structure, the extracted license claim would be placed into the File:License field in a form such as: "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)". Such a format allows for searching the license field by both license name and URL.

License claims will similarly be extracted from RDFa metadata embedding in XML formats.

Links

Related works:

 cclookup (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcLookup) - Python application for extracting license RDF metadata or license metadata from mp3s. Code may be adapted for parsing license claims in C
 ccpublisher (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher) - Licenses embedded by ccpublisher should all be correctly extracted.

Related links:

 http://creativecommons.org/technology/usingmarkup
 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/RDFa