IST students create site for digital media sharing

University Park, Pa. -- A class assignment has turned into a virtual gallery exhibition for three sophomores in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

For the past academic year, the three -- Catriona Cornett, Jason Scott and Robert Shedd -- have been working on what they call a "framework for digital media sharing" or F.R.O.G. that will enable Internet photo sharing as well as advanced image searching and retrieval.

Developed with non-proprietary software tools, the site is similar to other Internet sites because it allows users to upload digital photographs. But fotofrog.com differs from other sites as it incorporates the content-based image-searching and retrieval technology developed by James Wang, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, and Jia Li, assistant professor of statistics. The University has a patent pending on their technology that can "learn" to annotate and retrieve digital images from text queries.

The connection with Wang was made when Cornett, Scott and Shedd were first-year students in IST. In spring semester 2004, they met in Wang's database class, during which they created the predecessor of fotofrog.com. The actual assignment: To develop a dynamic database-driven Web site in PHP, a programming language, using the database-management software MySQL.

Wang was so impressed with their initial effort that he offered the three the opportunity to take their class project to a new level. Their work has been funded by the National Science Foundation's Research Experience for Undergraduates program.

"The framework these three students have built is for photo sharing opportunities but can also be used for other media sharing applications," Wang said. "Not only have these students designed the architecture for managing the site, but they have written the software for the entire site as well."

Going from classroom to virtual gallery has been "a learning experience," said Shedd, who has had his own Web development company since 2002. "We've gotten a lot of experience using the UNIX operating system, PHP language and relational database engines."

While Wang has provided some help in weekly meetings -- "He wants us to figure it out on our own," Cornett said -- the three have mostly taught themselves. They researched similar services, investigated content management systems, and experimented with ways to customize those systems.

"We broke things and fixed them," Scott said.

Their challenges ranged from mastering the details of a programming language to creating a unique service not already found on the Internet. One of the tougher hurdles was identifying the best content management system, a task which took almost an entire semester as the three experimented with more than half-a-dozen tools.

Fotofrog.com debuted at the second annual IST Future Forum on in late April 2005, but additional features still are being developed. The site hasn't yet fully integrated Wang's search-and-retrieval technology, for instance.

Once that is done, the students "will begin looking at other forms of digital media that can be shared," Shedd said. "We're interested in getting as wide an audience as possible."