Towards extracting flickr tag semantics

We address the problem of extracting semantics of tags -- short, unstructured text-labels assigned to resources on the Web -- based on each tag's metadata patterns. In particular, we describe an approach for extracting place and event semantics for tags that are assigned to photos on Flickr, a popular photo sharing website supporting time and location (latitude/longitude) metadata. The approach can be generalized to other domains where text terms can be extracted and associated with metadata patterns, such as geo-annotated web pages.