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The Commons Explorer

By on October 30, 2011

Recently, thanks to a message sent to the Code4Lib list by Dr. Tim Sherratt at the University of Canberra, I discovered the Commons Explorer. This is a very cool software application, that runs on almost any platform (Windows, Unix, Mac) with Java installed.

What it enables you to do, with a required network connection, is to explore any of the photos uploaded to the Flickr Commons. The initial screen offers a method to browse by institution. Once an institution is selected, you see a word cloud and a set of tiny thumbnails below that represent individual images. As you hover over a word in the word cloud, it may show both linkages to other words in the word cloud as well as individual images that match that word. Clicking on a given word will narrow your browse to images with that word, both in the resulting word cloud and the images displayed below. As there are fewer images displayed, they grow in size.

Clicking on an individual image brings up a larger version of the image within the Explorer, and clicking on it again takes you to the image on Flickr.

This is a wonderful application with which to explore the richness of the Flickr Commons. My only (minor) gripe is that it doesn’t allow you to explore across collections – you must first select a collection before exploring by subject. And frankly, most people don’t care about collections — they care about what they care about, which is going to be topics rather than institutions. But that is a relatively minor gripe with an application that is fun to play with and that quickly and easily exposes the richness of the Flickr Commons. Kudos to Mitchell Whitelaw who developed this cool application!

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Filed Under: Roy Tennant: Digital Libraries
Roy Tennant About Roy Tennant

Roy Tennant is a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. He is the owner of the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions, and the creator and editor of Current Cites, a current awareness newsletter published every month since 1990. His books include "Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow" (2008), "Managing the Digital Library" (2004), "XML in Libraries" (2002), "Practical HTML: A Self-Paced Tutorial" (1996), and "Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook" (1993). Roy wrote a monthly column on digital libraries for Library Journal for a decade and has written numerous articles in other professional journals. In 2003, he received the American Library Association's LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Excellence in Communication for Continuing Education. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.

Comments

  1. pbinkley says:
    October 30, 2011 at 10:06 am

    It would be nice if this didn’t depend on a commercial entity like Flickr: we haven’t uploaded our stuff into Flickr (yet), so we can’t play. A linked open data approach would seem to be the way to make it easy to share the necessary data and metadata, but Flickr has what we don’t have: user-contributed tags. Without those the value diminishes sharply. I guess we’ll just have to think of Flickr as our publicity department.