skip to main content
10.1145/1135777.1135810acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesthewebconfConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Visualizing tags over time

Published: 23 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We consider the problem of visualizing the evolution of tags within the Flickr (flickr.com) online image sharing community. Any user of the Flickr service may append a tag to any photo in the system. Over the past year, users have on average added over a million tags each week. Understanding the evolution of these tags over time is therefore a challenging task. We present a new approach based on a characterization of the most interesting tags associated with a sliding interval of time. An animation provided via Flash in a web browser allows the user to observe and interact with the interesting tags as they evolve over time.New algorithms and data structures are required to support the efficient generation of this visualization. We combine a novel solution to an interval covering problem with extensions to previous work on score aggregation in order to create an efficient backend system capable of producing visualizations at arbitrary scales on this large dataset in real time.

References

[1]
J. Allan, J. Carbonell, G. Doddington, J. Yamron, and Y. Yang. Topic detection and tracking pilot study: Final report. DARPA Broadcast News Transcription and Understanding Workshop, 1998.
[2]
S. Chien and N. Immorlica. Semantic similarities between search engine queries using temporal correlation. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on World Wide Web, pages 2--11, 2005.
[3]
R. Fagin, A. Lotem, and M. Naor. Optimal aggregation algorithms for middleware. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 66(4):614--656, 2003.
[4]
S. Golder and B. Huberman. The structure of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 2006.
[5]
A. Guttman. R-trees : A dynamic index structure for spatial searching. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pages 47--57, 1984.
[6]
M. Hadjieleftheriou, G. Kollios, V. J. Tsotras, and D. Gunopulos. Efficient indexing of spatiotemporal objects. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conferences on Extending Database Technology, pages 251--268, 2002.
[7]
S. Havre, B. Hetzler, and L. Nowell. ThemeRiver: Visualizing thematic changes in large document collections. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 8(1):9--20, 2002.
[8]
J. Kleinberg. Bursty and hierarchical structure in streams. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 7(4):373--397, 2003.
[9]
J. Kleinberg. Temporal dynamics of on-line information systems. In M. Garofalakis, J. Gehrke, and R. Rastogi, editors, Data Stream Management: Processing High-Speed Data Streams. Springer, 2006.
[10]
H. Korth and A. Silberschatz. Database System Concepts. McGraw-Hill, second edition, 1991.
[11]
R. Kumar, J. Novak, P. Raghavan, and A. Tomkins. On the bursty evolution of blogspace. World Wide Web, 8(2):159--178, 2005.
[12]
J. Lin, E. J. Keogh, S. Lonardi, J. P. Lankford, and D. M. Nystrom. Viztree: a tool for visually mining and monitoring massive time series databases. In Proceedings of International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, pages 1269--1272, 2004.
[13]
B. Milash, C. Plaisant, and A. Rose. Lifelines: visualizing personal histories. In Proceedings of the International Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 392--393, 1996.
[14]
D. Millen, J. Feinberg, and B. Kerr. Social bookmarking in the enterprise. ACM Queue, 3(9):28--35, 2005.
[15]
S. Robertson and S. Walker. Okapi/Keenbow at Trec-8. In Proceedings of the 8th Text Retrieval Conference, pages 151--161, 2000.
[16]
M. T. Roth, M. Arya, L. Haas, M. Carey, W. Cody, R. Fagin, P. Schwarz, J. Thomas, and E. Wimmers. The Garlic project. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, page 557, 1996.
[17]
S. Saltenis, C. Jensen, S. Leutenegger, and M. A. Lopez. Indexing the positions of continuously moving objects. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pages 331--342, 2000.
[18]
B. Shneiderman. Tree visualization with tree-maps: 2-d space-filling approach. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 11(1):92--99, 1992.
[19]
M. Vlachos, C. Meek, Z. Vagena, and D. Gunopulos. Identifying similarities, periodicities, and bursts for online search queries. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pages 131--142, 2004.
[20]
I. Witten, A. Moffat, and T. Bell. Managing Gigabytes. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, second edition, 1999.
[21]
Y. Yang, T. Pierce, and J. Carbonell. A study on retrospective and on-line event detection. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 28--36, 1998.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Visualizing tags over time

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
    May 2006
    1102 pages
    ISBN:1595933239
    DOI:10.1145/1135777
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 23 May 2006

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Flickr
    2. interval covering
    3. social media
    4. tags
    5. temporal evolution
    6. visualization

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    WWW06
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)3
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 19 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2021)Time and Temporality in HCI ResearchInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwab02533:3(250-270)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2021
    • (2020)Troubling DesignACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/339719927:4(1-36)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2020
    • (2020)Commanding and Re-DictationACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/339088927:4(1-31)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2020
    • (2018)Tag Clouds: Past, Present and FutureProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section A: Physical Sciences10.1007/s40010-018-0571-x91:2(369-381)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2018
    • (2017)A Geo-Clustering Approach for the Detection of Areas-of-Interest and Their Underlying SemanticsAlgorithms10.3390/a1001003510:1(35)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2017
    • (2016)Privacy preserving via interval covering based subclass division and manifold learning based bi-directional obfuscation for effort estimationProceedings of the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/2970276.2970302(75-86)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2016
    • (2015)Semantic-Analysis Object Recognition: Automatic Training Set Generation Using Textual TagsComputer Vision - ECCV 2014 Workshops10.1007/978-3-319-16181-5_22(309-322)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2015
    • (2014)Multimedia Social NetworksEncyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch662(6736-6745)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2014
    • (2014)MemGuardACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/2678373.266568342:3(49-60)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2014
    • (2014)Social Popularity ScoreProceedings of the First International Workshop on Internet-Scale Multimedia Management10.1145/2661714.2661722(3-8)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2014
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media