Leveraging Ontologies, Context and Social Networks to Automate Photo Annotation

This paper presents an approach to semi-automate photo annotation. Instead of using content-recognition techniques this approach leverages context information available at the scene of the photo such as time and location in combination with existing photo annotations to provide suggestions to the user. An algorithm exploits a number of technologies including Global Positioning System (GPS), Semantic Web, Web services and Online Social Networks, considering all information and making a best-effort attempt to suggest both people and places depicted in the photo. The user then selects which of the suggestions are correct to annotate the photo. This process accelerates the photo annotation process dramatically which in turn aids photo search for a wide range of query tools that currently trawl the millions of photos on the Web.