Some disconnected comments/ideas on this:
Earlier this week Hulu added facial recognition to deal exactly with the "What has she/he been in?" question http://www.geek.com/articles/news/hulu-adds-face-recognition-2011128/
Another example of searching by image to find the solution to a web layout issue: http://herr-heaven.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/solving-problem-on-website-using.html?spref=tw
The links being added between Wikipedia and VIAF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Authority_control_integration_proposal/RFC) might facilitate some kind of image search related to person authority records.
My guess is that book cover images could be very helpful in this way. My knowledge of the services offering cover images to libraries is a bit out of date, but my experience is that these are currently implemented with a single image per book (which doesn't capture the variation in covers across editions, territories, etc.) and retrieve the cover image on-the-fly at time of display which is a bit limiting (I thought LibraryThing offered bulk download of covers but can only see the API details at the moment - although since they encourage local caching would be more possible to think about using some image analysis s/w across a locally cached set of covers relating to a specific collection)
Owen
Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: owen_at_ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936
On 30 Aug 2012, at 00:17, Ed Jones <ejones_at_NU.EDU> wrote:
> I expect this has happened to many others, especially since the advent of the smart phone/pad computer and the ubiquity of the web. At any rate, it happens regularly with me.
> My wife and I were watching a DVD the other night, when an actor appeared that she recognized from some other (unknown) context. Armed with my handy-dandy iPad, I opened the IMDb app and looked for the program we were watching (in this case, an episode of a series called MI-5). Not knowing the name of the actor, I browsed through the images of the actors appearing in that episode and found the one she was talking about. Clicking on his image, I was taken to his IMDb page, with all the other films and series he had appeared in. There I was able to identify Downton Abbey as that other context.
> Although the actor's name was revealed in the course of my search, I began my search with just an image, not a name. And in fact I reached my destination entirely via images. I would never have reached my destination in the absence of the image.
>
> As online catalogs routinely include images of the covers of books, etc., to facilitate identification, we may want to start including images of people, etc., in authority records in order to facilitate all the FRBR user tasks.
>
>
>
> Ed Jones
> Associate Director, Assessment and Technical Services
> National University Library
> 9393 Lightwave Avenue
> San Diego, California 92123-1447
>
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>
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Received on Thu Aug 30 2012 - 03:15:09 EDT