Exploiting "The World is Flat" Syndrome in Digital Photo Collections for Contextual Metadata

According to Thomas L. Friedman, the world has become "flat" with collaboration among individuals in most if not all aspects of life becoming reality. The Internet is the backbone of this phenomenon as we are beginning to see collaborative efforts in the domain of digital photos, generating additional contextual information that could be used for image search and retrieval. In addition, photos are usually part of collections and this association would also provide additional contextual information. However, not much work has been done to provide structural exploitation of this additional contextual information and this paper presents some concepts on how to do so