All the tags

This is a fascinating page on Flickr (takes a while to load): an aggregate of every tag appended to every photo. Surely a marketeer's wet dream. No semantic framework though (likely to be an ongoing problem with user-generated metadata.) What Flickr needs is picture-recognition technology. I saw a demo once where the application initially required training; users must tag images with the names of subjects. Thereafter, the application began to ‘learn’ the names of subjects contained within new photos with an 80% accuracy level. I saw another demo that partly inferred from a camera phone's location data what the contents of the photo might be. Once this data has been obtained, it can then be fed into controlled vocabularies, making it much more valuable.

Posted by monoman at 12:25 PM on July 27, 2004