[OpenGLAM] Elog.io now up w/ Commons data

Thu Dec 11 08:35:05 UTC 2014

Dear all,

this may be of interest to some of you who have collections available
through Wikimedia Commons (and to everyone else too, for that matter,
but in different ways).

Yesterday, we released the public beta of Elog.io, a catalog of
creative works initially seeded with 22,452,638 images from Wikimedia
Commons. Elog.io provides a way to search that collection by a
perceptual hash, which matches an image even if it's been moved away
from Commons, resized, and had its format changed.

You can get more information and download our browser extensions from
http://elog.io/

Why is this relevant, you ask? Let's say you really like ferrets, and
you're reading about ferrets on the Examiner web site:
http://www.examiner.com/article/ferret-color-and-pattern-variations
And you see the image of a ferret on a bed and think "this looks
familiar!" With Elog.io, you can match that image of a ferret on a bed
to Wikimedia Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Domestic_ferret.jpg

You'll learn where it's from and what license it's under, despite this
not being included in the Examiner web site. The same would be true
for any collection which is part of the Elog.io catalog. As of right
now, we've only included Wikimedia Commons, but we're actively looking
to include other collections too.

What the browser extensions allow you to do in addition to matching an
image you find
"in the wild" against Wikimedia Commons is that it provides a quick and
handy "Copy as HTML" to copy the image and attribution as a HTML
snippet for pasting into Word, LibreOffice, Wordpress, etc.

Elog.io is also an open API, which provide lookup functions to find
information using a URL (the
Commons' page name URL) or using the perceptual hash, which can then
be implemented in other applications.

Sincerely,

-- 
Jonas Öberg, Founder & Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow
Commons Machinery | jonas at commonsmachinery.se
E-mail is the fastest way to my attention