xml in tiff headers

From: Eric Lease Morgan (eric_morgan@NCSU.EDU)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2000 - 08:34:01 CDT

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    Message-Id: <200007171340.GAA15760@dns.ccit.arizona.edu>
Date:         Mon, 17 Jul 2000 09:34:01 -0400
From: Eric Lease Morgan <mailto:eric_morgan@NCSU.EDU>
Subject:      xml in tiff headers
To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU

    <pre> Has anybody here explored the possibility of putting XML data in TIFF headers?

    I see a consistent problem with image databases, and that problem is the disparate nature of the image and its description (metadata). Along with the usual suspects such as title, author, and date, I see in most image databases fields named "URL" or "file name", and these fields are intended to be placeholders for the location of the bitmapped data -- the image. Alternatively, the database could be designed to include a BLOB field to hold the bitmapped data itself. In the former case, a lot of time and energy needs to be put into making sure locations are correct. In the second case you need some sort of special script to extract the BLOB data and render it. Neither of these solutions seem wonderful. Consequently, I am exploring the possibility of exploiting TIFF and TIFF headers by "marrying" an image's description with the image itself.

    Assume the existence of a DTD. This DTD will outline how I want to describe my images. Next, I write an XML file corresponding to the DTD and describing a particular image. Third, I insert that XML file into one of the
    "tags" of TIFF files -- say the image description tag. The end result will be a TIFF file displayable by any TIFF reader. If you wanted to know about the image, you would extract the XML from the image's header and interpret the XML in any number of ways: HTML, XML, SQL INSERT commands, appended to a text file for indexing, etc.

    Using this solution I could give away my TIFF files and allow other people to use them accordingly. As one person has said, "Your TIFF files would know about themselves."

    What do you think? 

    --
Eric Lease Morgan
NCSU Libraries
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/

    </pre>

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