Katie's Swiss Trip: A Study of Personal Event Models for Photo Sharing

There is currently a trend in media management and the semantic web to develop new media processing methods and knowledge representation techniques to organize and structure media collections around events. While this increased interest for events as the central aggregator of media is supported by strong research in the fields of knowledge representation and computer vision; it is not yet clear how the digital era users use events when sharing their personal media collections. In this article, the authors first analyze and discuss a survey on photo-taking behavior and then explore a dataset of publicly available online albums to find out how users share photos. Based on the results of these studies, the authors show that, while media sharing services do not support events as yet, users still share their media around personal events, either by providing explicit spatio-temporal metadata in free text form, or by using an event-centric vocabulary when titling their collections of photos.