ACRONYM - Annotation CReatiON for Your Media

The Annotation CReatiON for Your Media (ACRONYM) project provides a robust, scalable, context-based approach towards automating photograph annotation. Instead of using content-recognition techniques the ACRONYM approach leverages context information available both in the user's ambient space - the scene of photograph capture - and in the user's information space. Low level data such as photographer, time, location and the set of devices detected nearby are captured cheaply and automatically by a camera phone via its User Interface (UI), system clock, GPS receiver and Bluetooth transceiver respectively. Higher level information on people, photographs, events and places are indexed from the user's Online Social Network, albums, calendar and the GeoNames online geographical feature database respectively.

Armed with ground truth data about the photograph on one hand and with access to a dataset of people, photographs, events, places and devices on the other, algorithms suggest which people, places and events are represented in an attempt to bridge the semantic gap. The user can then select which of the suggestions are correct, annotating those selected to the photograph. In keeping with the DataPortability and Linked Data efforts, the annotations are exported as portable Semantic Web metadata both for storage inside the photographs and reuse by other applications such as search engines. This process accelerates the photograph annotation process dramatically which in turn aids a wide range of information retrieval and knowledge management tools that currently trawl the billions of photographs stored on the Web, local networks and private machines. The running demo, technology flyer and poster below provide some additional detail. Further reading

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