Yahoo! Research releases TagMaps/WorldExplorer, with GeoRSS I/O

Yahoo! Research Berkeley is datamining the 10 million+ geotagged flickr photos (all available in GeoRSS btw), and particularly deriving meaning from the association of geotags and folksonomic tags. Particular words become associated with particular places, and that’s interesting and potentially useful. Yahoo explains it better.

How’s this new development relate to GeoRSS? The World Explorer data is available through an API which returns GeoRSS. And the TagMaps visualization tool reads data in GeoRSS. A nice input output cycle of GeoRSS.

Interestingly, this touches on a recent GeoRSS list discussion on how to apply styling to GeoRSS. Though we concluded that GeoRSS should focus on data without styling, I did note the worldKit associates different styling options (like color, size, and opacity) with the field. Similarly, TagMaps uses the category to set the size of each tag. So, a potentially useful “in the wild” convention.

2 Responses to “Yahoo! Research releases TagMaps/WorldExplorer, with GeoRSS I/O”

  1. Andrew Turner Says:

    This is great news. However, it’s about time Yahoo caught up in their API’s and supported GeoRSS Simple at least. GeoRSS W3C (geo:lat/geo:long) is deprecated. Flickr outputs GeorSS Simple.

  2. admin Says:

    Agreed — yahoo is a bit late to the party here.

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