January 17, 2007

Yahoo! Research Berkeley unveils the World Explorer

What happens if you automatically extract information from Flickr's geotagged images to create a rich visualization of the world we live in? It opens a window to explore the entire world through the eyes of the users of Flickr.

The World Explorer uses public geotagged photos contributed to the world by the Flickr community, automatically extracts the tags that are relevant and representative for each map region or zoom level and connects these tags to the photos that represent that area.

The best thing about it? The World Explorer is build on top of open APIs. It uses two main components. The TagMaps, a Flash/SWF object that visualizes tags (i.e., text terms) on a map and the open APIs.

You can use the data APIs to get Flickr tags of any location, roll your own TagMaps based on a custom geoRSS data feed or create a badge for your blog, MySpace page or any other page that you want to pimp up.

This embedded element is set to take you to Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park.

Mor from the Yahoo! Research Berkeley team covers the World Explorer in his detailed blog post.

A huge 'thank you' to all the Flickr users that generated the underlying data! Happy Mashing!

Dan Theurer

Posted at January 17, 2007 10:05 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: David Baxtin at January 24, 2007 7:15 PM

Posted by: konzentrator at January 25, 2007 8:47 AM