Enhancing search in a geospatial multimedia annotation system

The development of numerous information sharing platforms have led to the emergence of multimedia user-generated content. With the prevalence of networking mobile devices and Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, these contents could also be tagged with their location (geo-tagged) and visualised on a map through a geospatial information system. This in turn raises new challenges to manage the information retrieval process due to the potentially large amounts of data presented on the map. In this paper, we present a spatial clustering approach to enhance the searching feature of MobiTOP, a geospatial annotation system. The technique, which is a modification of DBSCAN (Density based spatial clustering applications with noise) coupled with our ranking schemes, is compared against other techniques. The evaluation results suggest the viability of our approach, and implications are also discussed.