Adding a Semantic Layer to Flickr Images Search Service

The growing amount of images on the Web, the diffusion of social media sharing web sites demand effective tools for searching targeted images. In general, the performance of Web image search depends on the quality of images annotation, but often the keywords (or tags) associated to an image are given without relevance information, strictly connected to a subjective feeling of the taggers and far from the objective description of the image. In this paper, we propose a simple approach for social media sharing web sites such as Flickr, Zooomr, etc. to support users to retrieve images semantically correlated to a given tagged image. In this paper, we present an application scenario for Flickr: in general Flickr returns all the images that meets the input tags, without no semantic analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of the search results. Our approach adds a semantic layer on the Flickr output: processes the tags associated to the retuned images to discover the appropriate semantics of them, by arranging the results in a more user friendly view.