Visualizing Tags with Spatiotemporal References

Nowadays, a great amount of data is created and distributed on the Internet. Tagging has become common practice to structure these data for easy access. Often the data and the associated tags contain spatial and temporal information. In this paper, we develop general design strategies for visualizing spatially and temporally referenced tags similar to tag clouds on maps. Temporal information of tags is encoded through the visual appearance of text or through additional visual artifacts associated with the tags, whereas the location of tags on a map illustrates the spatial references. We demonstrate our solution based on an interactive visualization prototype for the exploration of both spatial and temporal references of Flickr tags.