World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections

The availability of map interfaces and location-aware devices makes a growing amount; of unstructured, geo-referenced information available on the Web. This type of information can be valuable not only for browsing, finding and making sense of individual items, but also in aggregate form to help understand data trends and features. In particular, over twenty million geo-referenced photos are now available on Flickr, a photo-sharing website - the first major collection of its kind. These photos are often associated with user-entered unstructured text labels (i.e., tags). We show how we analyze the tags associated with the geo-referenced Flickr images to generate aggregate knowledge in the form of "representative tags" for arbitrary areas in the world. We use these tags to create a visualization tool, World Explorer, that can help expose the content of the data, using a map interface to display the derived tags and the original photo items. We perform a qualitative evaluation of World Explorer that outlines the visualization's benefits in browsing this type of content. We provide insights regarding the aggregate versus individual-item requirements in browsing digital geo-referenced material.