Larry Larsen, writing at Poynter.org, a site for journalists that I frequent, notes a new piece of software, Grazer, that tags digital images with GPS coordinates in the IPTC field.
The what? The “Telecommunications Council (IPTC) was established to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the World’s Press. Now its activities are primarily focussed on developing and publishing Industry Standards for the interchange of news data.” As I understand it, the newspaper folks have developed their own standard for how to store geographic metadata in images.
Since this is journalism site, he notes its implications: “Sadly, this is probably going to be another example of consumers blowing the doors off media companies followed by years of catch-up, and that’s too bad because some killer new-media applications could be developed with our existing content.”
Maybe I’m out of line here, but what about ISO standard JPEG2000 and the current work to include georeferencing information in it? Is that not good enough? I for one have never heard of the IPTC fields (or whatever they are) and wonder if the news folks spoke to the geo folks before creating this “standard”?
