Why GEORAMA ?

Among the challenges dealing with the growing amount of available information and knowledge on the web, Georama is a research project focused on geographic images retrieval that means the accessibility of representation of our world.

Very popular services linked to the geographic information have been proposed : online mapping services (Google Map, Yahoo! Map, Mappy…), Google Earth or the Flickr functionalities for the geo-localized images (Flickr Map / Places).

There are still important challenges that have to be taken up. Most of them are related to the extraction and use of available knowledge on the web, scattered in heterogeneous and unstructured sources. How can we gather these information in a structured manner ? and how can we use such resources to propose new interactions with the users ? Another important challenge is (since we deal with images) the use of content-based image indexing and analysis techniques.

Georama is a research project that will tackle some of these challenges by:

• creating automatically a large-scale structured gazetteer (Gazetiki);
• using this gazetteer with content-based image analysis and indexing technique to improve the search & browsing process.