A famous Portuguese Perl hacker, author of the recent Acme::AsciiArt2HtmlTable module and I have been pondering the best way to classify the shapes in Acme::EyeDrops module to make them more amenable to searching and selecting.

You see, he wants, for example, to select from the many shapes available, only the faces of Perl celebrities.

I'm struggling a bit, not having much experience in this field. My first instinct was to look at the web site of a famous British Perl hacker to learn how to search his magnificent photo collection. acme seems to use some sort of keyword search, but when I typed in "perl celebrity" I was told to "Please come back later" in eight different languages.

My next instinct was to steal an idea I remember from Subversion, that of allowing arbitrary "properties" (key-value pairs), aka metadata, to be associated with a file.

And that is what I plan on implementing. That is, to allow any number of arbitrary properties to be associated with a shape. For example: 

merlyn:
name=Randal L Schwartz
face=1
person=1
perlcelebrity=1

smiley:
face=1

buffy:
face=1
person=1

kermit:
face=1
cartoon=1

camel:
animal=1

[download]
That way, given a shape property hash reference $p, you can find all faces (even smileys and kermit) by testing each shape for: 
$p->{face}

[download]
while if you only wanted human faces you would use instead: 
$p->{face} && $p->{person}

[download]
and if you wanted only human Perl celebrity faces you would use instead: 
$p->{face} && $p->{person} && $p->{perlcelebrity}

[download]

It seems to me the idea of attaching arbitrary properties to a file (shape, photo, whatever) is generally useful but I have little experience in this domain and little clue on how to define what the properties or keywords should be.

My current candidate property list for my shapes is: 

name                  Name of the person in the shape
cpanid                cpanid of the person in the shape
description           description of the shape
author                author of the shape (ascii art)
authorcpanid          cpan id of the author of the shape
source                photo that the shape was derived from
face                  is it a face?
person                is it a person?
animal                is it an animal?
flag                  is it a flag?
map                   is it a map?
hbanner               is it a horizontal banner?
vbanner               is it a vertical banner?
object                is it an object? (a beer bottle, say)
planet                is it a planet?
underwear             is it an item of underwear?
cartoon               is it a cartoon character?
perlcelebrity         is it a famous perl hacker?

[download]
So, if you have some bright ideas on how to tackle this problem, please let us know.

In reply to Properties, metadata and Perl celebrities by eyepopslikeamosquito

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