The success and failures of geotagging

Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on October 19, 2006

Without a doubt, geotagging on sites such as flickr have been a huge success. Initially geotagging was done by hand, then with third party scripts, then with third party web 2.0 tools and then, once it had reached critical mass, flickr itself started to support it natively.

Geotagging, the act of adding geo-spatial references to photos, is however, in deep trouble, and as the numbers of geotagged photos now exceed five million, those deficiencies are starting to cause serious trouble. These problems are not new and librarians, surveyors and other workers-in-metadata may well recognise them as new incarnations of very old issues.

The first issue is semantic. Does the location refer to the location of the photographer or of the subject? While this may not seem important, a 300mm zoom can easily take pictures of mountains a hundred kilometers away, and then it is an issue.

The sceond issue is quality. Many flickr users do they best to geotag as accurately as possible, but are frequently limited by the resolution of the mapping systems they are using. Google maps and Yahoo maps have differing levels of coverage, and there are a number of instances in which a feature's location differs by several hundred meters between the two. Some users use automated GPS geotagging, which relies of the clock of the GPS unit and the camera being exactly synchronised, but results in very high-quality location information if they are. Other flickr users are less diligent, some merely drag all the photos they took while visiting a city over the city in a geotagging tool, often resulting in errors of tens of kilometers.

The third issue is infra-structural. Currently, all the mapping systems are country-oriented (presumably because the sources of satellite images and maps are country-oriented) which means that areas that don't fall into a country (or worse, fall into more than one...) suffer from various forms of brokenness. These areas include the arctic and antarctic, non-country territoties, war zones, mid-ocean areas and the like.

cheers, stuart

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		The success and failures of geotagging Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on October 19, 2006 Pier and Church on Kos Without a doubt, geotagging on sites such as flickr have been a huge success. Initially geotagging was done by hand, then with third party scripts, then with third party web 2.0 tools and then, once it had reached critical mass, flickr itself started to support it natively. Geotagging, the act of adding geo-spatial references to photos, is however, in deep trouble, and as the numbers of geotagged photos now exceed five million, those deficiencies are starting to cause serious trouble. These problems are not new and librarians, surveyors and other workers-in-metadata may well recognise them as new incarnations of very old issues. The first issue is semantic. Does the location refer to the location of the photographer or of the subject? While this may not seem important, a 300mm zoom can easily take pictures of mountains a hundred kilometers away, and then it is an issue. The sceond issue is quality. Many flickr users do they best to geotag as accurately as possible, but are frequently limited by the resolution of the mapping systems they are using. Google maps and Yahoo maps have differing levels of coverage, and there are a number of instances in which a feature's location differs by several hundred meters between the two. Some users use automated GPS geotagging, which relies of the clock of the GPS unit and the camera being exactly synchronised, but results in very high-quality location information if they are. Other flickr users are less diligent, some merely drag all the photos they took while visiting a city over the city in a geotagging tool, often resulting in errors of tens of kilometers. The third issue is infra-structural. Currently, all the mapping systems are country-oriented (presumably because the sources of satellite images and maps are country-oriented) which means that areas that don't fall into a country (or worse, fall into more than one...) suffer from various forms of brokenness. These areas include the arctic and antarctic, non-country territoties, war zones, mid-ocean areas and the like. cheers, stuart flickr \| folksonomy \| geospatial \| Geotagging \| google maps \| satellite images \| tagging \| Web 2.0 \| web20 Stuart's blog Login or register to post comments 3263 reads
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