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SummaryWe submitted for FOSS4G in South Africa.

Description *The hope right now is to try and articulate this vision as widely as possible and to get feedback on it. In that light we're going to pop in on the major events and hopefully get into one or more of them. At least we'll have a good excuse to travel! South Africa also sounds like fun. See [[http://conference.osgeo.org/foss4g/2008]] about FOSS4G. Basically it is a group of open source social cartographers and hackers coming out of the same community that has been pursuing this for the last ten years but now really picking up steam. Here's what we submitted for FOSS4G: *About the ImageWiki Project,* The ImageWiki ( http://imagewiki.org ) is an attempt to build an "image commons" around the emerging possibility of visual search. It needs help, input and support. Many commercial organizations are rushing to build visual search engines and each of them has specific markets in mind. We are also doing something similar except that we are doing it as an open source public utility. Using the SIFT algorithm we are able to cluster images together based on similarity. We can assert that a a series of images, such as a series of pictures of a specific beer bottle label, taken from different vantage points, or partially obscured, or upside down or blurry, may in fact be referring to the same beer bottle label. Effectively we create a strong relationship between images and we can then leak meta-data between those images. If a given image has a description, a link, tags or a location associated with itself, then we can make a leap that other images may also have similar associations. This has strong locative aspects. If you take a picture of a store front with your camera phone, and you post it to a shared server - then somebody else who takes a picture of the same store front may be able to discover that you were nearby and when. So for example if the image commons were to be populated with Google Street View - you would have a way of using photos of buildings themselves as a kind of GPS. There are however a variety of other interesting and unsolved implications. It is clear that an Image DNS will emerge and there is a question of who will own that Image DNS. Wikipedia faced the same challenges in attempting to define an objective database of human knowledge. There are specific participants such as corporations who invest a lot of money in defining a certain brand identity - will they protest when visual searches do not return their website first? OpenStreetMaps also faced similar kinds of problems in that the ownership and provenance of their data had to meet the highest standards of integrity or else be at risk of putting their entire database and their entire effort at risk. Creative Commons Licensing and Copyright Law does not seem to cover the case of what metadata should be returned on an visual search query. This appears to be new ground. We will present on both our open source effort to define a shared durable open and public Image Commons and will comment on some of the unexpected and rather surprising social, legal and political implications that will come out of this new capability that humans will soon have.