Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

TagExplorer

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Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

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TagExplorer was a Yahoo! Research prototype for browsing Flickr photos through semantically organized tag clouds. It brought together work on tag recommendation and tag classification.

Context

The project explored how related tags could help people move beyond a simple keyword search to browse and refine photo collections.

My role and contribution

Applied Scientist. I made the prototype at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona based on my own research work.

How it works

After a user searched for a term such as “London,” TagExplorer showed photos from London alongside semantically grouped suggestions, such as locations (England, Southwark) and landmarks (Big Ben, London Eye). Users could refine a search by selecting a more specific tag, or broaden it by selecting a related tag such as “river.”

tagexplorer_london
Search result page after the user searched for london
tagexplorereye
Search results page after the user chose to zoom into London Eye photos
tagexplorerriver
Search results page after the user chose to explore the parallel topic of rivers

Outcome

The prototype was released as an official Yahoo! Labs demo and showed how semantically related tags could support both more specific and broader browsing of Flickr photos.

Technology

PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, Flickr API

Related Publications

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson and Roelof van Zwol. TagExplorer: Faceted Browsing of Flickr Photos. Yahoo! Labs Technical Report (YL-2010-005). 2010. [more]

Simon Overell, Börkur Sigurbjörnsson, and Roelof van Zwol. Classifying Tags using Open Content Resources. Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2009). 2009. [more]

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson, and Roelof van Zwol. Flickr Tag Recommendation based on Collective Knowledge. Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW’08). 2008. [more]

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