Tonight in class, Dr. MacCall talked about ways to automate, or partially automate, metadata entry in digital libraries. While highly sophisticated automation is beyond the scope of our class project, it's useful to be aware of the possibilities in case we need them later in our careers. Using our football image library, Dr. MacCall suggested as an example that perhaps instead of manually typing in a whole, possibly difficult-to-spell name (e.g "Baumhower") every time, the image cataloger could instead type in the player number (in this case, 73) and lookup software would provide the correct name.
Of course, it couldn't really be that simple, and the discussion quickly turned to all the ways it could go wrong (reassigned numbers, duplicate numbers, partial numbers, and so on), as well as the myriad rules for uniform numbers allowed on the field every game. I never realized that football uniform numbers were so complicated! Furthermore, that complicated uniform number system would have to be written into the rules of the number-to-name matching software. Thus numbering rules intended to reduce confusion on the actual football field would be re-purposed as a schema intended to reduce errors in a virtual library of football images. How wonderfully poetic to think that the rules and structure of the game itself could become an integral part of creating a football image library!
The best way to look at play numbers is from the perspective of coaching strategies. This means that if we're "in the business" of sports image indexing, we need to be cognizant of this competitive reality and adjust our expectations accordingly. By that, I mean that if we're going to commit to player identification (by number) for every game, then the metadata manager needs to procure the "official" roster for every game in the season ... not hard to do once the need is identified! :)
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