Fresh from Y!RB comes this funky new TagMap visualizing thing, working on the same principle as … oh wait it’s easier just to show you first (RSS readers start your browsers now to view the Flash Badge Widget Thing) …
Ok, so (very) basically it’s pulling the tags from geotagged photos and figuring out which tags represent what area, so in some respects it’s similar to the Flickr Geocodr I posted about a while back. Looking at the TagMap for London you can clearly see both areas and landmarks being well defined on the map. Dragging the map around and zooming in and out reveal what’s been tagged at different levels.
To me, this is really showing what the power of tagging is all about. The system doesn’t really know or care what the tagged items are (actually not strictly true but good enough for the sake of this post) it happily smooshes together locations, objects, architecture, events, monuments and so on (in early prototypes I saw the tag “BBC” was very prominent on the London map) and displays them. It’s sort of the opposite of Layers in Google Earth, where each Layer is for a distinct information type, what’s being displayed here is what the photographers thought was important enough to tag the photo as regardless of it’s categorization.
What’s also hinted at in the Night Explorer is that tags change over different cycles of time. Taking the Paris Riots as an example, in the over-all tagging scheme of things they probably wouldn’t show up as a ‘location’ on a map of Paris, but certainly during a specific time period ‘Riot’ would appear and then disappear from the map. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some time based animated maps kicking around, but I’m not sure if they are public or just internal. Hopefully someone from over at Y!RB will leave a comment on this post about those and I’ll add an update.
Unless I wasn’t supposed to mention them yet, in which case I’ll pull the sentence above and only you lot out in RSS land will have read that last bit [hello RSS readers *waves*].
Right, important links part …
- http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/
- World Explorer
- Night Explorer
- Add a Tag Map to your own site, like the spiffy one above.
And now some fairly obvious statements …
- This is all part of Yahoo! Research Berkeley, where the people are way smarter than me and also frankly rock.
- Flickr is part of Yahoo!
- I work for Flickr.
- Personally I’d love to see some form of this functionality in Flickr, especially the algorithms behind it, and, you know, that’s entirely within the realms of possibility.
- Scaling needs to be taken into account, we have something like a gahbahzillion photos and tags in Flickr now.
- No promises on features or timescales, ok! Just to cover my ass.
We’re not that smart, we just have more play time…
I hope this can scale - it had no problem with 6M images, and running time is about linear in the number of photos.
Regarding time… we all remember TagLines (from the mothership), but I think we can do better. Stay tuned…
More details are now posted on our blog.
Dan,
That is VERY cool! Thanks for posting about this. With EveryTrail we are working on something similar, but focused on travel.
Cheers,
Joost
I would like to see Flickr at least add a “tag suggest” feature for geotagged photos. I love tags, but hate the tedious process of thinking them up and typing them. I would tag a lot more if I could click from a list of candidate tags.
That should scale fine because it can work from infrequently updated TagMaps data.
Geotagging items is a nice but not new idea. One of its earlier champions, unfortunately felled by leukemia, was Dr. Yvan Leclerc at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. I was part of his team. You can read about the team’s work at SRI’s Digital Earth archival website. Pay particular attention to the GeoWeb proposal made to ICANN in 2000, which proposed and described the most global geospatial metatagging scheme yet. (Thank ICANN internal politics for delaying geotagging by half a decade.) It would be nice to see someone run with this dormant but still potent technology, although I suspect that competition among the Yahoos, Googles, etc., fueled by an insane financial market, would prevent the necessary holism for it to be successful. I welcome questions and comments.
[...] [via GeoBloggers [...]
[...] Yahoo Research is going in interesting directions with datamining the relationship between geo and folksonomic tags. And Dan Catt hints at some future direction visualizing along the time dimension as well. 10 million plus photos with location, with time, associated with free form words. There’s definitely some meaning lurking in this folksonomy. [...]
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