Re: [OSCOM] Open source DAM

[email protected] wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 10:11:38AM -0700, Robert Koberg wrote:
> 
>>Hi Tony,
>>
>>Perhaps all your 'Art Historian in need of structure' needs is subversion:
>>
>>http://subversion.tigris.org/
>>
>>particularly:
>>
>>http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/svn-book.html#svn-ap-a-sect-6
> 
> 
> I don't get it. How would you implement a DAM solution with
> a version control system? Binary only files in a source code
> repo? AFAIK subversion uses mod_dav metadata storage (when
> using the apache server backend -- please correct me if this
> changed). This is an o.k. solution for use cases where you
> just need queries of the type: "all metadata related to resource x".
> How would subversion answer questions like: "list all resources
> created in France between 1402 and 1437 by flemish painters"?
> Or: "All resources for which there is more than one scan"?


Well, the user seemed somewhat technical and the requirements were not 
great. /Maybe/ that is all he needs. Just a thought after reading the 
requirements...

The properties section of svnbook mainly uses binaries as examples. From:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/svn-book.html#svn-ch-7-sect-2

"Say you wish to design a website that houses many digital photos, and 
displays them with captions and a datestamp. Now, your set of photos is 
constantly changing, so you'd like to have as much of this site 
automated as possible. These photos can be quite large, so as is common 
with sites of this nature, you want to provide smaller thumbnail images 
to your site visitors. You can do this with traditional files. That is, 
you can have your image123.jpg and an image123-thumbnail.jpg 
side-by-side in a directory. Or if you want to keep the filenames the 
same, you might have your thumbnails in a different directory, like 
thumbnails/image123.jpg. You can also store your captions and datestamps 
in a similar fashion, again separated from the original image file. 
Soon, your tree of files is a mess, and grows in multiples with each new 
photo added to the site.

Now consider the same setup using Subversion's file properties. Imagine 
having a single image file, image123.jpg, and then properties set on 
that file named caption, datestamp, and even thumbnail. Now your working 
copy directory looks much more manageable—in fact, it looks like there 
are nothing but image files in it. But your automation scripts know 
better. They know that they can use svn (or better yet, they can use the 
Subversion language bindings—see the section called “Using Languages 
Other than C and C++”) to dig out the extra information that your site 
needs to display without having to read an index file or play path 
manipulation games."


best,
-Rob


> 
> HTH Ralf Mattes
> 
> 
>>best,
>>-Rob
>>