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Flickr Fountain of Knowledge

What can we learn from Flickr? Well, for one, we have learned that there are a lot of people who like to take photographs and share them publicly. Who would have guessed! However, my question refers to a different type of knowledge: information about the world that is implicitly encoded in the activity on Flickr.

You do not need to go far to see a simple yet brilliant example of such knowledge: check out Flickr’s tag clusters (here are the clusters for love, jaguar, Taj Mahal, hack). Using tag co-occurrence on Flickr photos, Flickr’s clustering can break down a term into multiple semantics or meanings: Jaguar, for example, is the animal as well as the car and the guitar: the first co-occurs with the tags “zoo” and “cat”; the second meaning of “jaguar” appears with “car” and “auto”. Note that these meanings are not mined from any other resource: they represent some “knowledge” that is generated automatically from the implicit contributions of Flickr users uploading and tagging their photos.

In other examples, Patrick Schmitz developed a different co-occurrence model that allowed him to generate subsumption data in Flickr tags (e.g. San Francisco is subsumed by California). The work at Yahoo! Research on TagLines and at our own lab on Tag Maps had shown that Flickr community activity generates descriptive labels for events and locations.

Last week, in Amsterdam, as part of SIGIR 2007, we added yet another method of extracting knowledge from Flickr. The paper, “Towards Automatic Extraction of Event and Place Semantics from Flickr Tags”, by Tye Rattenbury, Nathan Good (two of our star interns) and myself*, begins to answer a simple question: given a tag that appears on Flickr (such as “dog”, “SIGIR 2007″, or “Yahoo! Research Berkeley”), can we automatically determine whether or not that tag refers to a specific place, and whether or not the tag refers to a specific event? As you may guess, SIGIR 2007 refers to an event, Yahoo! Research Berkeley is a place, and “dog” is neither a place not an event.

Knowing if a tag is a place or event leads to better image search, but can also help us to better visualize the Flickr data; generate automatic event and place gazetteers; associate missing time/location metadata based on tags, and more.

I will not get into the details of how we propose to do extract the place/event knowledge from Flickr; you can get these details in our paper (pdf). I will just mention that we are using the dataset of geotagged Flick photos, and looking at the time and location distributions for each individual tag in the dataset. If the location or time distribution for a tag have specific “structure” to them, we classify that tag as a place or event, accordingly.

Below, you can follow the presentation slides I gave at SIGIR, or just jump directly to the paper to get the full story.

While the debate on the “Is the semantic web is dead?” question continues, “emerging semantics” are alive and kicking. What other knowledge can be extracted from the Flickr dataset?

* “Towards” is a code word in research papers meaning “we didn’t take the research all the way quite yet but want to make the paper sound important nevertheless” - we try not use it too much.

Got N95? ZoneTag Now Runs on Nokia 3rd Edition Phones

You have a spiffy new Nokia N95, N73 or one of Nokia’s latest and greatest new cameraphones, but you were not able to run ZoneTag? Be sad no more. We’re very happy to announce ZoneTag now works for Nokia Series 60 3rd edition phones. For phones like the N95 with built-in GPS, ZoneTag will make geotagging easier than ever.

So, what are you waiting for? Get ZoneTag now. If you are a new user, just click the big orange “Try it now button”. If you are an existing ZoneTag user looking to upgrade (come back to ZoneTag!), click on the My ZoneTag link on top and you’ll see instructions on how to upgrade.

While you’re at it, make sure you check out ZoneTag’s faithful companion, Zurfer, the coolest mobile photo viewing experience on the planet. And let us know how it goes.

Looking forward to seeing all your super hi-res photos up on Flickr!

Hack Day TV - for Y! UK Hack Day

For those of you who could not be there in person at the Y! UK Hack Day, we’ve got a video treat for you. Want to see what hacks were presented? Want to see how people held out under the 90-second presentation rule after 24 hours of straight hacking? But you don’t want to slough through hours-long video footage? It’s cool, you don’t have to.

We’ve made a whole new way to watch long form video on the web, in snack-bite sizes, just the way we like our TV. In Hack Day TV, you can see a list of all the hacks (including which hacks won the judges awards), you can launch URL demos for many of the hacks, and, best of all, you can jump to any hack instantly to watch it (no waiting for it to load or fast forwarding through the video to try and find things). We’ve also displayed the list of hacks directly on the video time line, which makes scanning around for hacks incredibly simple. When you select a hack, the URL will change to point to that part of the video. This way you can directly link to an individual hack, for example check out the Best Overall hack from the NYTimes R&D Lab.

Surf over to Hack Day TV - UK and check it out.

Oh Bay Area people, Learn about the Fire Eagle this Monday

Are you in the Bay Area? Are you dying to learn about Fire Eagle and get early Super Alpha VIP access? Then come to Mobile Monday this week, July 2nd. Even if you are not dying to learn about Fire Eagle, it would be a great chance to learn and discuss location based services.

* What: July 2007 Mobile Monday (Location Based Services)
* When: July 2nd, 2007 7:00pm
* Where: TellMe Networks Inc., 1310 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041
* Who: Anyone interested in mobility
* Cost: Nothing!

Official announcement; Upcoming event. See you there!