In 1993, as I started building my first websites and image galleries; I became frustrated by my inability to express any significant content about my images. Without being able to define the relationships of the words to the image AND being able to distinguish the words in context to each other; I felt that the ‘tagging’ and ‘keyword’ exercise was just like putting more hay on the haystack.
In 2002, I began discussions about these frustrations with my friend, Pat Hayes, noted Semantic Web scientist and author of the RDF semantics. And in 2006, I was able to clear enough time to focus my professional interests in this direction and together, Pat (who is also an artist) and I started work on several joint research projects to see how we could resolve some of the problems with simple image tagging using semantic web techniques.
Currently, we are tweaking our first release of a lightweight ontology for describing images (LIO) which will also take advantage of other linked data on the web and we are in the process of designing markup tools for everyday people.
— Margaret Warren