Raw

Yesterday Flickr, the poster child Web 2.0 photo site (heh, if you're familiar with phrases like "poster child" and "Web 2.0" you're bound to know Flickr already) added UI support for geotagging. The tagging itself is a simple convention that emerged, to locate a photo you just have to add three tags:

• geotagged
• geo:lat= latitude e.g. geo:lat=51.4989
• geo:lon= longitude e.g. geo:lon=-0.1786

What Flickr have added is a map interface, to add/view the locations of the photos. (Here's mine - the only ones I've added were a couple of batches I tagged manually a few months back).

Nice eh? It gets better. They've got an RESTful interface aka API which includes access to the geo data (along with loads of other stuff).  There's also XML-RPC & SOAP for the whips and leather brigade. A quick skim of their license terms suggests the data's open enough to be useful.

According to their blog, in the 24 hours after launching the service 1,234,384 photos were geotagged. That's nearly 4 million triples! (In total they've got more than 200 million photos, with half a billion tags).

I've not looked into it yet, but they've also got some integration with Upcoming.com, for locating/tagging photos related to events. Flickr also has an embedded social networking thing, so there should be loads of FOAF available. People, places, photos, the thing's semweb on a stick. 

§ 

It wouldn't be fair of me to sing praises of Flick without a nod to Timothy Falconer's company Immuexa for whom I've been contracted of late. A year or so ago they launched their semweb-based (personal) online information (sharing) tools. For a small fee you get various cool social services. They'd spent a year or two building an domain-independent RDF infrastructure and put together quite a broad set of facilities on top. But the part they'd chosen to devote most of their energy to, something badly lacking on the web at the time, was photo sharing. Can't remember exactly but their launch was within a week or so of Flickr.

But Tim and his sidekick, agile guru Jon Kern, aren't flash in the pan merchants, they rode it out. Their company is 8 years old, they've got various irons in the fire, including taking on contracts from other companies. What I've been doing recently for them is towards a big semweb-based healthcare project, it's pretty cool stuff.  

 

@en