Nate (@xolotl) from hypothes.is had the idea of finding similar images using reverse image search , the process where you input an image as your search term, and google returns similar images (or other images from that webpage, etc).
For ReFigure, this could mean running the search from the figure you are looking at, find other images/figures on the web that are similar, add relevant ones to the ReFigure. So it's about discovery of related material before it's been curated/linked by a scientist.
This brings up several Qs:
- Are scientific figures indexed on Google appropriately to be used in this way?
- Is the search algorithm refined enough for scientific application? For example, it may not be useful to find graphs with a similar pattern, because they could be about completely different experiments. I could see a potential use case for microscopy images - are there other cells that look like this, or that cluster like this? - but the algorithm would need to be finetuned enough to show the relevant findings and not present the user with lots of microscopy images that are similar but irrelevant.
- Would this be useful? If you are asking about your own work, then maybe you would want to do so without having an image published already (whether in journal or repository), in which case ReFigure isn't the tool to employ this functionality.
Leaving this thought here for future reference, thanks to Nate for bringing it up!
Nate (@xolotl) from hypothes.is had the idea of finding similar images using reverse image search , the process where you input an image as your search term, and google returns similar images (or other images from that webpage, etc).
For ReFigure, this could mean running the search from the figure you are looking at, find other images/figures on the web that are similar, add relevant ones to the ReFigure. So it's about discovery of related material before it's been curated/linked by a scientist.
This brings up several Qs:
Leaving this thought here for future reference, thanks to Nate for bringing it up!