Using Flickr geotags to find similar tourism destinations

The amount of geo-referenced information available on the Web is constantly increasing due to the large availability of location-aware mobile devices and map interfaces. This is enabling new search paradigms (e.g. “What is here”) but also it is generating a large amount of unexplored georeferenced collections. In particular, in photo collections like Flickr the co-existence of geographical metadata in conjunction with text-based annotations (tags) generates interesting location-driven trends and patterns in textual data. When enough information is available, analysis systems can identify these patterns and extract aggregate knowledge. This inspired me in creating a novel method to extract representative place descriptions using users’ text annotations obtained from Flickr geo-referenced photos. In such a way I propose an attempt to predict similar locations based on the similarity of their respective descriptions. The prototype has been implemented as a web based tool and it has positively evaluated, through a survey, by more than a hundreds of users.