Scientists Milk Flickr Archives for Sweet, Sweet Tourism Data

May 8, 2009 at 3:01 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

We've already tried to sell you on the virtues of Google Earth as a trip companion, but now a new study by a group of Cornell scientists promises to take the idea of web-assisted travel planning to a qualitatively higher level.

As part of developing and demonstrating new algorithms for photo analysis, the scientists downloaded over 35 million Flickr images from more than 300,000 users. They then analyzed and compiled the photos in all kinds of mindbogglingly complex ways, before finally doing a bunch of datamining to come to some high-falutin, scientific conclusions about our travel photography habits.

Thanks to their Flickr fun, it has now been established to an impressive level of scientific rigor that people like to take photos of their vacations. Specifically, they like to take pictures of their vacations in New York City, London, San Francisco, Paris, and Los Angeles.

Here's where it gets neat: In addition to ranking the most photographed cities, the scientists also used their new techniques to rank the most popular landmarks in those cities. The result, if somebody managed to wrangle all this data into a user-friendly form, would be a de facto online travel guidebook.

Instead of having to guess for yourself, you could now ask the intertubes, or simply Flickr, for the answer to that age-old question of "what are the three things I have to see?" Be aware that there is a whiff of youthful influence on the data, with Austin clocking in as a top 25 city and the Apple Store as the 5th most popular shot in Manhattan.

A PDF of the original paper is to be found here. It's very scientific sounding, but there lies some genuine touristic information in them there hills.

[Photo: David Crandall via Physorg]

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