Mappr!
- Most of these photographers have no idea they are participants in an information visualization experiment.
- View.
Play along, codeconners
- Send your photos to place90values@photos.flickr.com from your cameraphones. They'll be automatically tagged with "san francisco," "california", and "codecon".
Flickr
- Flickr.com: is a photo sharing service (community), has a REST-style developer-friendly API, and uses tags for organizational purposes.
Flickr's tags
- Lots of people tag their photos in flickr.
Flickr's tags... of places!
- Many of these (something like 20%) refer to locations.
Flickr's tags... a "folksonomy"
- Tags are interesting - a non-hierarchical "folksonomy" allowing many different kinds of searches.
What to do with them all?
- We started thinking of ways that these tags could be used as a data source.
How Mappr makes guesses (1 of 4)
- First, we built up a big database of place names around the world, primarily from freely-available US Government sources like the US Postal Service and the GeoNet Service.
How Mappr makes guesses (2 of 4)
- Mappr is a way point for data, a geographic, semantic extension to Flickr that answers questions such as "Where was this?" and "Who else was here?"
How Mappr makes guesses (3 of 4)
- Free-form tags in Flickr are compared against this hierarchical database, and best-guesses are made.
How Mappr makes guesses (4 of 4)
- Guessing is informed by lots of hand-tweaked information about place names, adjusting for perceived fame, common words, first names. Conflicting info is resolved by picking the largest, closest-match.
The Map is Only One Output
- The visual map is only one possible client for this data.
Mapped Images
-
pre-mappr: eric snowdeal's postcard project
specifically for mappr: green destiny's capitol project
revealed via mappr: route 66
done during this presentation: codecon