Re: The "A" in RDA

Hiya,

So, um, to play the part of the sour-puss;

Karen says;
> Google uses the text provided by web page creators to interpret
> the meaning of the images; it doesn't interpret the images themselves.

Just a quick correction; this was probably true a couple of years ago, but
nowadays that's simply not true. All (well, most; there's filters that
apply) images you find through Google are indexed after an image
interpreter have gone through. This won't tell you what's going on in super
details, of course, like interpret the meaning of some scene, but it can
detect people, recognize them, tag them, detect female nipples (important
to the US for some reason :) ), some attributes about the weather (sunny,
raining, etc.), similarities to other pictures (yesterday I uploaded a
bunch of pictures of our local classical musical ensemble, and similar
pictures were automatically merged to form animated samples, for example,
in addition to automatically tag faces it recognized), dominant colors,
some shape recognition and a few other bits. And note; this is only the
beginning.

I find it odd, though, to use pictures as an example of how Google isn't as
good. Does the library truly go better? Last I remember, the library, too,
didn't interpret pictures.

Now, if I walked into the library and asked for pictures of happy people
playing in the sun, could you give that? No, not a chance. Or a picture of
a cat that looks like Hitler? (in your face, Library!) Could you show me
all existing pictures of Wittgenstein? Pictures of Einstein hanging
washing? Or the engine block of a Volvo V70 2001 model? There are far more
instances of Google giving me the right answer with pictures than not, and
I can't for the life of me understand what service you actually think
you're bringing to the table anymore.

And of course, if Google is doing this to images now (and voice; have you
tried the latest voice search? Pretty cool), what else are they also doing
in the written text area? We all know about citation in Google Scholar.

And you guys are still talking about the "A" in RDA? Good grief.