5 ms·

Flickr reverse engineers the shapes of continents, countries, cities, and neighborhoods.

75 points by danw 18y ago

Tichy 18y ago
Cool, I speculated on this a couple of months ago in my blog (although even then it was already fairly predictable). http://blog.blinker.net/2008/04/15/exploring-geotags/ http://blog.blinker.net/2008/04/15/exploring-geotags/ Another application could be to monitor the spreading of plants and animals, or other memes (fashion sense, cars, etc.). When I wrote the blog article, it was difficult to get GeoTag information out of flickr (no search option for "images with GeoTags"). Anyway, I wish more data was freely accessible...
raldi 18y ago
I don't get this. It seems to say, e.g., "We reverse-engineered the shape of Texas by drawing a line around all the photos marked 'Texas'." So? How did the photos get marked "Texas" in the first place?
- robg 18y ago
  Each one of those illustrations represents the boundaries of a particular place whose outline was generated using nothing but the latitudes and longitudes of the geotagged photos associated with that location’s WOE ID.
  - chime 18y ago
    Correct. But where does the WOE ID come from? Are people manually typing those in or they are using something like http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ to come up with the WOE ID? If WOE ID is generated based on latitude/longitude of a place, then all they are doing is a plotting data originally retrieved from their own DB. Say I have a table of 40,000 zipcodes in US. You take a picture in zipcode 33708 and ask me for WOE ID / state and I say "Florida" and then you upload the picture. Now do this ten million times for every zipcode. Now I will look at every picture with WOE ID / state = Florida and find a list of zipcodes and map them. Obviously they will map out the entire state of Florida. After all I gave you all the state names. Not that this isn't cool or anything. Just trying to determine how cool it is. If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be super-cool indeed. But if they did it by the method above that I described, it is cool but it's also a big "duh."
    - jrockway 18y ago
      If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be super-cool indeed. This is what I thought about while reading the article, but it doesn't appear to be what they did. It would be fun to try this, though, and probably wouldn't be that hard, either.
    - vlad 18y ago
      That's because the submission title is misleading (the blog post says nothing about "reverse engineering" anything.) Here is what flickr actually did: "Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can." So yes, they're just tracing around the points in their database to see what kind of shapes they will get, for the experiment of seeing how well they could represent a given (country, state, town) by connecting coordinates of photos taken closest to the real borders of those actual regions.
hugh 18y ago
I'd be more interested in seeing the cases where this kind of thing fails. Surely there must be some? Does New York have an outpost in Las Vegas surrounding the New York New York casino? Is Venice a bi-lobed city spread between northern Italy and southern California? Does Sydney exist primarily in Australia, but have a lot of tiny outposts surrounding all the places where girls called Sydney have posed for photographs?
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  Flickr, or almost any social network site - particularly with an Amazon style "real name" option - would be in a great position to geotemporally track names. As of Q4 2008, this is the worldwide distribution of Hugh's, and you can see that name changing in poularity around the world as you drag the visualisation back to Q1 2003...
cousin_it 18y ago
Too bad that for commercial use, this information is locked up within Flickr.
Jonathan-e 18y ago
What a load of hype about nothing. All they are trying to do is fool the uneducated into thinking they have actually done something special. A very cheap marketing ploy. They are the ones who specify which location geo-coded photos fall in to, so it is no surprise that when they over lay them on a map, they match the borders of the actual locations....
- nailer 18y ago
  Flickr have reverse-engineered the technology to physically locate states. This information is no longer limited to a few select vendors who've signed NDAs and non-compete clauses. Finally people can develop their own mapping applications that work with the existing statename / location combos. This means you will be able to tell where you are. I thought I was in London, which coincidentally turned out to be right when I checked on Flickr's new reverse-engineered 'map' technology, but it could have totally gone the other way.

75 points by danw 18y ago

Tichy 18y ago

Cool, I speculated on this a couple of months ago in my blog (although even then it was already fairly predictable). http://blog.blinker.net/2008/04/15/exploring-geotags/ http://blog.blinker.net/2008/04/15/exploring-geotags/ Another application could be to monitor the spreading of plants and animals, or other memes (fashion sense, cars, etc.). When I wrote the blog article, it was difficult to get GeoTag information out of flickr (no search option for "images with GeoTags"). Anyway, I wish more data was freely accessible...

raldi 18y ago

I don't get this. It seems to say, e.g., "We reverse-engineered the shape of Texas by drawing a line around all the photos marked 'Texas'." So? How did the photos get marked "Texas" in the first place?

robg 18y ago
Each one of those illustrations represents the boundaries of a particular place whose outline was generated using nothing but the latitudes and longitudes of the geotagged photos associated with that location’s WOE ID.
- chime 18y ago
  Correct. But where does the WOE ID come from? Are people manually typing those in or they are using something like http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ to come up with the WOE ID? If WOE ID is generated based on latitude/longitude of a place, then all they are doing is a plotting data originally retrieved from their own DB. Say I have a table of 40,000 zipcodes in US. You take a picture in zipcode 33708 and ask me for WOE ID / state and I say "Florida" and then you upload the picture. Now do this ten million times for every zipcode. Now I will look at every picture with WOE ID / state = Florida and find a list of zipcodes and map them. Obviously they will map out the entire state of Florida. After all I gave you all the state names. Not that this isn't cool or anything. Just trying to determine how cool it is. If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be super-cool indeed. But if they did it by the method above that I described, it is cool but it's also a big "duh."
  - jrockway 18y ago
    If they had used latitude/longitude + tags to generate this, then it would be super-cool indeed. This is what I thought about while reading the article, but it doesn't appear to be what they did. It would be fun to try this, though, and probably wouldn't be that hard, either.
  - vlad 18y ago
    That's because the submission title is misleading (the blog post says nothing about "reverse engineering" anything.) Here is what flickr actually did: "Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can." So yes, they're just tracing around the points in their database to see what kind of shapes they will get, for the experiment of seeing how well they could represent a given (country, state, town) by connecting coordinates of photos taken closest to the real borders of those actual regions.

hugh 18y ago

I'd be more interested in seeing the cases where this kind of thing fails. Surely there must be some? Does New York have an outpost in Las Vegas surrounding the New York New York casino? Is Venice a bi-lobed city spread between northern Italy and southern California? Does Sydney exist primarily in Australia, but have a lot of tiny outposts surrounding all the places where girls called Sydney have posed for photographs?

jodrellblank 18y ago
Flickr, or almost any social network site - particularly with an Amazon style "real name" option - would be in a great position to geotemporally track names. As of Q4 2008, this is the worldwide distribution of Hugh's, and you can see that name changing in poularity around the world as you drag the visualisation back to Q1 2003...

cousin_it 18y ago

Too bad that for commercial use, this information is locked up within Flickr.

Jonathan-e 18y ago

What a load of hype about nothing. All they are trying to do is fool the uneducated into thinking they have actually done something special. A very cheap marketing ploy. They are the ones who specify which location geo-coded photos fall in to, so it is no surprise that when they over lay them on a map, they match the borders of the actual locations....

nailer 18y ago
Flickr have reverse-engineered the technology to physically locate states. This information is no longer limited to a few select vendors who've signed NDAs and non-compete clauses. Finally people can develop their own mapping applications that work with the existing statename / location combos. This means you will be able to tell where you are. I thought I was in London, which coincidentally turned out to be right when I checked on Flickr's new reverse-engineered 'map' technology, but it could have totally gone the other way.