Ontology2 founder Paul Houle spoke at the NYC Semantic Web Meetup last week. His talk, "What Would You Do With Free Pictures of Everything on Earth?" described the origins of Ookaboo, the technology behind it, and the API that makes it possible to find pictures using precise Linked Data Terms. The slides to the talk are available on slideshare.

The talk tells the story of three predecessor sites to Ookaboo, animalphotos.info, carpictures.cc and ny-pictures.com. By expanding Ookaboo's scope, we were able to, paradoxically, simplify the process of taxonomy construction. This kept us focused on the process of accurately attaching pictures to topics. The talk invited the audience to "build their own Linked Data cloud" using hundreds of data sources that can be linked to Freebase and DBpedia and, by doing so, creating entirely new kinds of applications, such as the Ookaboo API.