Review of Microsoft OneDrive Cloud Repository.  It may be an easy tool and service(s) to save files.  If you know what you roughly want to find, most Cloud repositories are easy and straight forward to use.   Over time, if not managed appropriately, the cloud repository becomes burdensome to manage, e.g. access and find files.  If stuck in the “file folder organization storage” mentality of organizing our content,  our Cloud storage solution will become quickly unyielding.   Getting into habits like tagging your content should help us to access files beyond the “Folder Borders”.  To the contrary, there are huge opportunities to leverage and grow existing platforms, specifically around the process service of [file] Ingestion.

Challenges:

• Bulk file loading, e.g. photos from our smartphones, maybe the entire family uploads to the same storage repository
• If performed by the “Ingestion Service”, manual user “tagging” of a group of photos, or individual images may be available.
• Geotagging may be available either at the time of image capture , or upon the start of the “Ingestion Service”
• Facial Recognition, compared to the likes of services such as Facebook, based on my experience, are not readily available to personal Cloud Storage repositories.
• Auto tagging pictures upon ingestion, if performed, may leverage “Extracted Text” from images.  Images become searchable with little human intervention.

Cloud File Repository:  Storing Content

I created modified existing Microsoft Office files”tags”, in this case MS Word and PowerPoint file types were used.  I opened the Word file, and selected “File” menu, “Save As” menu, then “More Options” under the list of file types.  I was then presented with the classic “Save As” form.  Just below the “Save as type” list box, there were 3 “metadata” fields to describe the file:

• Authors:
• Tags:
• Title:

The first two fields are semi colon ; delimited and multiple values are allowed.  In this test case, I added to the “Tags” field “CV;resume;career”.  I then used the MS Windows Snipping Tool that comes with the OS to document the step.  I called the file MSWordTags.PNG and saved this screen capture to my OneDrive. Then I saved the document itself on my OneDrive.

Cloud File Repository: Finding Content

I then started up Internet Explorer, and went to the https://onedrive.live.com site to access my cloud content.  On the top left corner of the screen, there is a field called “Search Everything”, and I typed in CV.

Results:

• The search results included ONLY the image screenshot file that contained the letters CV, and not the MS Word file that explicitly had the Tag field with the text value CV.
• Looking at the file properties as defined by OneDrive, there was ALSO a field called “Tags” with no values populated.  For example, the Cloud “Ingestion” service did not read the file for metadata, and abstract it to the Cloud level. just two separate sets of metadata describing the same file.  To view the Cloud file data, select the file, and there is an i with a circle around it.  Too many ways to store the same data, and may lead to inconsistent data.
• For the Cloud file information / properties, the image file had a field called “Extracted Text”,  and this is how the search picked up the CV value in the Cloud Search for my files with the “CV” tag.
• Oddly, the MS Word file attributes in OneDrive did not offer “tags” as a field to store meta data in the cloud.  The “tags” field was available when looking at the PNG file.   However, the user may add a “Description” in a multiline text field.  Tags metadata on images and not MS Word files? Odd.
• Future State (?):  If the Cloud Ingestion process can perform an “Extracted Text” process,  it may also have other “Ingestion services”, such as “Facial Recognition” from “known good” faces already tagged. e.g. I tag a face from within the OneDrive browser UI, and now when other images are ingested, there can be a correlation between the files.

As a business model, are we going to add a tier just after Cloud File ingestion, maybe exercise a third party suite of cognitive APIs, such as facial recognition?  For example, Microsoft OneDrive Ingests a file, and if it’s an image file, routes through to the appropriate IBM Watson API, processes the file, and returns [updated] metadata, and a modified file?  Maybe.

Update: Auto Tagging Objects Upon Ingestion

On an image with no tags,  I selected the “Edit tags” menu from the Properties pane on the right side of the screen.  As a scrolling menu, the option to “Add existing tag” appeared.  There were dozens of tags already created with a word, thumbnail image, and the number of times used.  Wow.  Awesome.  The current implementation seems to automatically, upon ingestion, identify objects in the image, and tag the images with those objects, e.g. Building, Beach, Horse, etc.

Presumption that Microsoft OneDrive performs object recognition on images upon file ingestion into the cloud (as opposed to in the Photos app).

“Extracted Text ” Metadata Field from within Microsoft OneDrive Image PNG File Properties:

Presumption that Microsoft OneDrive performs OCR on images upon file ingestion into the cloud (as opposed to the Photos app).