Thursday, September 07, 2006

Image coordinates

In the contract between California Digital Library (CDL) and Google, there is mention on page 5 of the "image coordinates." On page 10, it is noted that CDL cannot sell or make available to others the image coordinates. In hearing and reading about ALTO (Analyzed Layout and Text Object), I now can better describe to myself and others what CDL cannot give to others. It cannot give to others information that describes the layout and content of the pages that have been digitized. When one searches OCR'd text, it is the image coordinates that tell the search engine where the word you searched is located in the image.

Yesterday, in seeing a demo of a particular digital content management system, I wondered if the image coordinates being built would be transferrable. Even if the image coordinates were built by that system, could they be moved to another content management system? Or would they need to be rebuilt? It was a technical question that I did not asked, given the non-techies in the room. Perhaps the answer is an easy one (and maybe I'm concerned about nothing). Something for me to follow-up on...

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