[KPhotoAlbum] image search question

[josephj at main.nc.us]

> On Monday 23 April 2012 03:58:58 josephj at main.nc.us wrote:
>> Big picture - maybe a rant ;)  ...
>>
>> As I said earlier, I'm not super at databases, but one of the most
>> fundamental concepts I did learn was normalization.  Aside from being
>> very
>> nice and tidy mathematically, the main point of using it was to avoid
>> all
>> sorts of problems like this.
>>
>> If you're going to use tag subcategories, they should be strict.  I.e.
>> if
>> pool is under hotel a, that's the only place it should be because being
>> a
>> subcategory implies that it is just that, a subcategory of the
>> supercategory.  If it's not a true subset, then it should just be a
>> keyword or attribute that can be applied to any object.
> It's interesting (though not surprising) to see how the technical
> background
> of the users affects their expectation of what the software would do in
> certain situations. I am working in the field of computer graphics, and
> the
> data structure used to represent (sub-)categories in KPA (a directed
> acyclic
> graph) is so commonplace in computer graphics that I was happy to see and
> eager to use it in KPA. The same seems not to be true for databases, which
> you
> are probably more familiar with than me.
>
> Aside from this, I believe that allowing subcategories to be arranged not
> only
> in strict subset relations is a deliberately designed and implemented
> feature
> in KPA since a strict subset editor would have been much easier to
> implement
> (using the editing capablities of the QTreeView class). However, the
> default
> behaviour of the current implementation in KPA has some ambiguities which
> should be resolved.
>
> 	Kind regards,
> 		Markus
>
>
> --
> Markus Grabner
> Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision
> Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 16a/II, 8010 Graz, Austria
> WWW: http://www.icg.tugraz.at/Members/grabner
>
>
I studied databases so long ago that the only place a relational database
existed was in an IBM lab!  Hard to imagine now.  My point is that I'm
definitely not database savvy.  I have no idea what Jesper had in mind
when he built KPhotoAlbum.

Even though it conceptually looks like what you are trying to do should
work, I think that using the same subcategory or tag name to mean two
different things depending on context sounds more like AI than photo
indexing.  It's the kind of thing that you come back to after a few months
and have to figure out all over again. That level of complexity probably
isn't needed for what you want to do.

The main thing I am saying is that normalization is your friend.  If you
know enough math to do anything interesting with graphics - not even
mentioning vision (which I certainly don't), then spending an hour or two
getting familiar with normalization will probably pay off some time in the
future.

In the mean time, just using keywords instead of subcategories ought to
solve your immediate problem (regardless of whether KPhotoAlbum's search
has a bug or two.)

Joe