[Clipart] open clipart webservice.

[Jon Phillips]

On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 12:23 +0200, Thomas Zander wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm a core member of the KOffice[1] team and we are busy preparing the 2.0 
> release. As one of the major changes in KOffice2 we moved svg support 
> from being only usable in Karbon, to being usable in almost all KOffice 
> applications. Applications that currently have this support are Karbon, 
> Krita and KWord.  More will follow.
> 
> In KOffice2.0 we will ship a so called 'Shape Selector'. Which allows the 
> user to insert content into his document by selecting a template 
> visually.
> I had the idea that we should have a better integration with 
> openClipart.org directly in KOffice, in the Shape Selector. Which to me 
> means that no webbrowser would be needed, and no manual saving of the 
> clipart locally before being able to insert it into the document. We 
> would have a clip art browser with similar functionality as 
> http://openclipart.org/media/tags but more interactive.
> 
> For that to happen we should be able to query the clipart database, and be 
> able to do it without having to parse html.  The ideal method to do this 
> is to have the openclipart.org website generate xml documents instead of 
> html.
> For example we'd have openclipart.org/service/tags.xml which would contain 
> an xml fragment like;
>  <tags><tag items="7">athletics</tag>
> etc.
> and another page like;
> openclipart.org/service/clipart?id=123
>  <clipart><name>Bad hair day</name><tags><tag>girl</tag> 
> <date>200611012222</date><url>http://foo.bar/bhd.svg</url> 
> <rating>3.44</rating><license><public-domain/></license>
> <thumb>http://foo.bar/bhd.png</thumb>
> </clipart>
> 
> Is this something you guys would be interrested in?

Most definitely! Actually, our engine, ccHost already has this
functionality. Also, Bryce Harrington and gSoC student Bruno Dilly are
working on something similar for Inkscape, so cc'ing him. It would be
great to coordinate strategies.

> The webpages would not be too hard to write, I'd say. The output format is 
> not too strict so it would be a matter of writing a php page with the 
> tags and database access.
> 
> 1) http://www.KOffice.org

Yes, it would be quite easy to add another xml format output, but I
think better to use our current restful api that allows querying and
return of rss/atom.

Here is the info on it:
http://openclipart.org/media/viewfile/pool_api_doc.xml

We might need to extend the rss feeds for ratings and other quality
filters. First though, lets see how this plays out.

Cool!!! You rule!

Jon

-- 
Jon Phillips

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