Photron

Introduction

In the beginning, there were directories. Into these directories the peoples of the world placed their files, and it was good, for the directories gave unto the peoples sunshine and organization, and the peoples gave unto the directories a reason for existence. Among the files residing in the directories were images, which, while organized, felt that they were somehow failing to meet their potential. For among the files in the directories were text documents, often singular in purpose and content to live within a hierarchal society. Residing near the text documents were the audio files. The audio files were content to live in a hierarchal society, but found that they often had difficulty adapting to the organization and structure of foreign file societies when they traveled to new lands. Thus, the audio files were granted the power of metadata, and their identity was strengthened, even in foreign lands. Finally, there resided the image files. While they traveled less frequently and less predictably than their audio cousins, they found that they were often called to assemble into small groups and, through their powers combined, (form Captain Planet) present more detailed and relevant information than they could alone. Alas, the images found that merely finding common ground on which to assemble was made difficult by the walls of their hierarchal society.

It was thus that Photron descended from whence large intimidating robots descent and said unto the images, "I am Photron. Follow me, and through my large, intimidating robot powers, we shall totally wail on the problems imposed by your society. In your society you shall remain citizens, but through me, you shall be united in a parallel Web of Awesome." And, lo, the images rejoiced, and it was good.

The Point

Photron is intented to provide a sophisticated and flexible way to organize images without interfering with other organizational tools, especially directory structures. To do so, Photron will allow users to maintain a set of freeform "subjects" for images. An image handled by Photron can be identified as containing any number of subjects, and images can then be queried based on their content. Queries can generate subsets of an image collection that can be stored or otherwise manipulated.

Functions for editing the content of images or for communicating directly with digital imaging devices are deliberately not a part of Photron, which is designed to be an organizational tool, and not a full image editing suite.

Photron may also, from time to time, fire laser missiles in the pursuit of justice.

Development

Photron is currently under development. The following resources explain a little bit about what's going on behind the scenes.

SourceForge.net project page
Photron is hosted by SourceForge. The project page has information about checking out the Photron codebase from CVS, among other things.
Development journal
This is a blog-like set of status updates to which I record my thoughts regarding Photron's development and design. Most of it probably doesn't make much sense out of context (and there isn't a lot of context to be had), but I'll try to fix that by retroactively adding more background.
UML class diagram of org.photron.collection package
The org.photron.collection package is the semantic core of Photron. This diagram gives an overview of the objects involved.
Javadoc (Updated 2004-08-17 16:34 +10:00)
Photron's Javadoc is pulled directly from the source. Much of it is incomplete, but some parts have useful commentary. If nothing else, the Javadoc provides some clue as to what's in the API.
Jena
Jena is a semantic web framework initially developed by HP Labs. Photron relies heavily upon Jena.
Eclipse
I work in Eclipse, a Java IDE initially produced by IBM. I highly recommend it.
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