Assessment of the utility of tag clouds for faster image retrieval

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

5-21-2010

Abstract

Flickr, a web-based system for online photo management, has experienced rapid growth in popularity over the past several years, due to an increase in photo sharing as a social networking tool. Part of the excitement about Flickr is due to its use of tag clouds, which permit key words to be used as 'tags' associated with photos. Once tags are added to a photo, the picture can be retrieved for viewing by others based on the key words found the tag cloud associated with the photo. The research presented here examines the selection of words for inclusion in a tag cloud, and identifies the significance of the careful selection of tags. More frequently used words contribute to slower image retrieval, while less frequently used words, such as non-English terms, demonstrate a measurable increase in overall retrieval speed for the images associated with the tags. In addition, a personal tag cloud is built, integrated into Flickr, and shown to reduce the time taken for image retrieval by a factor of three, depending on the total number of images using the selected tag. Copyright 2010 ACM.

Publication Title

MIR 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGMM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval

First Page Number

437

Last Page Number

440

DOI

10.1145/1743384.1743461

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