Nicky RansomUniversity for the Creative Arts

Election night crowd, Wellington, 1931

Photographer: William Hall RaineElection night crowd, Wellington, 1931Reference number: 1/2-066547-FOriginal negative Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library

Tags

•William Hall Raine•crowd•men•hats•street•night•lighting•faces•sea of people•people•watching•event•election•results•populated

• Growth in number of images online

• Accurate and comprehensive indexing is critical to make online content accessible

• But visual materials are difficult to index

• Concept-based indexing – assigning index terms to describe the subject of an image

• Concept-based indexing – assigning index terms to describe the subject of an image

• Search engine indexing – index terms automatically created from data related to an image

• Concept-based indexing – assigning index terms to describe the subject of an image

• Search engine indexing – index terms automatically created from data related to an image

• Content-based indexing – using automatic processing to index image attributes such as colour, texture and shape

CIRES: Content Based Image REtrieval System

To find out value of tags for image retrieval by investigating whether the terms used to describe images in tags are similar to the terms used to search for images.– Which image facets are described in user tags?– How do these compare to those found in image

queries?– What are the implications for future use of

tagging for online indexing?

Armitage, L., & Enser, P. (1997). Analysis of user need in image archives Journal of Information Science, 23(4), 287-299.

Specific Generic Abstract

Who? Individually named person, group or thing (S1)eg Napoleon

Kind of person, group or thing (G1)

eg Skyscraper

Mythical or fictitious being (A1)

eg King Arthur

What? Individually named event or action (S2)

eg London Olympics

Kind of event, action or condition (G2)

eg Football game

Emotion or abstraction (A2)

eg Anger

Where? Individually named geographical location (S3)eg New York

Kind of place: geographical or architectural (G3)eg Forest

Place symbolised (A3)

eg Paradise

When? Linear time: date or period (S4)

eg 2010

Cyclical time: season or time of day (G4)

eg Spring

Emotion/abstraction symbolised by time (A4)eg Father Time

• Small scale study using 250 images and associated tags on Flickr

• Tags categorised using facets from ‘Shatford’s matrix’

• Comparisons made with results of previous research into user queries

• Limited sample size – only 250 images• Use of Flickr as domain for study – only 38% of

users apply tags• Subjectivity of categorising tags – only one

person assigning tags to categories• Suitability of Shatford’s matrix – 22% of terms

could not be categorised• Lack of online query studies with which to

compare the results

• Broad similarities between the image facets used in queries and image tags

• But differences in the level of specificity • Need to develop systems to bridge this gap• Consider the value of tags for browsing

systems