I’ve been developing a system similar to this. Now flickr is doing it. They’ve developed a great approach and are offering access via their API’s so developers can take advantage.
What are machien tags? From a flickr discussion:
Machine tags are tags that use a special syntax to define extra information about a tag.Machine tags have a namespace, a predicate and a value. The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to (‘geo’, ‘flickr’, etc.) The predicate is name of the property for a namespace (‘latitude’, ‘user’, etc.) The value is, well, the value.
Like tags, there are no rules for machine tags beyond the syntax to specify the parts of a machine tag. For example, you could tag a photo with :
- flickr:user=straup
- flora:tree=coniferous
- medium:paint=oil
- geo:cartier=”plateau mont royal”
- geo:neighbourhood=geo:cartier
Flickr has already used machine tags, informally, on a couple of occasions :
- When we launched Maps, we provided a way for people who had “geotagged” their photos to import their location data. This was done using the “geo:lat=...” and “geo:lon=...” tags.
