Geo-Tagging

V.S.I.P Raja
Faculty of Information Technology
University of Moratuwa

iroshan_priyantha@yahoo.com

Abstract: In the web community, revealing location
based information is an important event. Identifying
certain location in the world by its geographical
coordinates & use that information to the web context is
an emerging technology in the today’s world. This
technology used to express location based information in
the web is called geo-tagging. In the web, geo-tagging is
becoming increasingly used in photo sharing, blogging,
mapping, location searching, etc like media. This
technique allows users to add meta-data including geo-
location information to the media. Once the media is
geo-tagged, many other web applications can use them
to implement & enhance various systems for user
convenience. GPS technology is used to geo-tag media
according to the global location & many devices are
available nowadays in the world with flexibility & user
friendly usage. .
1. Introduction
With the development of the technology, the
use of computer based systems & devices have
been rapidly increased, because of the
reliability & efficiency of those systems.
People do various researches on information
transaction & communication in worldwide,
using the so-called sophisticated technology.
When considering the information processing
over the internet, sometimes people need to
know certain information regarding the
location. Geo-tagging is one of the major
research areas that people are investigating for
having a global data communication. The term
geo-tagging can be defined as the process of
adding geographical related data to various
media like images, photos, videos, blogs, RSS
feeds, etc. they are in the form of geospatial
metadata. The metadata includes latitude &
longitude coordinates of a certain media. Not
only the location coordinates, but also can
include details like place
names, a short description of the media,
ownership, taken by, etc. geo-tagging can help
users to find wide variety of location specific
information & this information can be used to
web enabled services to provide location based
news, web reports, maps, etc [17]. Geotagging
basically has two major steps to follow. At
first the toponym should be recognized &
identified separately. Then need to assign each
toponym the correct geographical coordinates
among possible interpretations [1]. Many web
based applications use Geotagging for certain
purposes. Web sites like Flickr use Geotagging
to tag the photos in various locations by the
global coordinates facilitating users with many
sophisticated tools [2, 13, 17]. Picasa is
another application which is similar to the
Flickr [19]. Other applications such as Google
Earth, Panaroma, and TripperMap use this
technology & facilitate users to geotag their
images. As the current web trend is going
together with Geotagging applications, I
selected this area as the research area for the
independent study.
The following sections of this document
provide more information about the concept of
Geotagging. Section two provides an overview
of Geotagging. Section three is about major
researches in Geotagging & major applications
& the development environment are discussed
in section four & five. Section six is about
future directions of the area & discussion of
the paper is in section seven. Finally, my
opinion in Geotagging is expressed in section
eight together with the acknowledgment.
2. Overview – Geotagging
Today the data communication through the
WWW is becoming a major trend & almost all
the industries are now moving forward with
web. When communicating over the countries
the location or the global positioning is very
important for recognizing certain data. People
need these data for knowledge, job related,
research, etc. therefore the concept of
Geotagging is employed in order to tag media
according to the global positioning. Then one
can use the technology to tag a media like
image according to the geo-location & publish
in the web. Then some other person may need
the location based information of the very
image & thanks for Geotagging, he is given all
geo related data. Therefore web users are
facilitate with tools to interact with media
more efficiently.
There are many researches are carried out in
various areas based on Geotagging. Mainly
many researches are based on Geotagging
images & sharing them in the web [1]. In that
case locating the images based on the global
position [1], identifying & tagging the image
by the content [6, 8], indexing images in a
database according to the scene & based on
that making models [11], propagation of
geotagged image relations [21], like areas are
mainly considered by the researches. Another
aspect is that Geotagging media with local
lexicons [16]. In this approach, the location is
considered more specifically according to the
local location & tag the media as per the local
lexicons [16].
When considering about location based data,
web pages also have a great deal of concern.
In a web page the use of location based
information is common thing & Geotagging
these data is considered in some researches.
Identifying text based differences in the web
pages, identifying the major area or the focus
of the web page is focused on this research &
by that the researches are able to point out the
importance of location based text in web pages
[6]. Mining cultural differences from a large
amount of geotagged images us another issue
that is currently being worked on by the
researches [10]. Mapping the photos by the
content [4] is another area which the
researches are looking forward. Geotagging
for tourism industry is an emerging technology
in today’s world. Mapping human travel
priorities [11], analyzing geotagged images for
tourist preferred places [12, 15]. Another
interesting research area which people looking
at these days is mobile Geotagging [23]. As
mobile devices are very commonly available
& cheap to use, adding geographical
information to communicate over the web may
be a value added application for mobile
devices.
As Geotagging is a rapid developing & useful
area, many web applications use this
technology. Flickr is one of the most famous
photo sharing web sites in the world, which
facilitate its users with Geotagging [13].
Complex algorithms are used to tag the images
according to the geo location, but users are
given very user friendly environment to
interact with the application [2, 17]. Another
vast growing application is Picasa which is
owned by Google. Picasa is a photo sharing
application which allows users to tag images,
videos, using its global position [19]. Most
widely known & used application which
recently employed the Geotagging is Google
Earth. The geotagged images can be used with
Google Earth to indicate each location of the
world. Google Spread sheets, paintmap.com
[20], Communitywalk [14], panaroma.com are
some other applications which allow users to
geotag images, paints, pictures as preferred.
The technology used to tag the media
according to the global position is called GPS
& many devices are equipped with GPS
receivers [3, 22] in order to track the location
& tag the media. With the rapid development
of the information technology, the devices &
applications are also become sophisticated to
use.
3. Major Researches in Geotagging
As mentioned above, Geotagging is a vast
growing area in web environment; therefore
many researches are carried out in various
areas. Each research is done with the purpose
of introducing a new concept of Geotagging &
help to implement new applications as well as
enhancing the existing applications based on
their findings. Many researches are done on
the basis of integrating Geotagging into
existing systems or new systems so that one
application is multi-capable. This section
discussed about the major researches carried
out by others with regard to Geotagging.
3.1. Geotagging Images & Sharing
Most of the researches are based on
Geotagging images at this point & when
Geotagging, the location, coordinates, content,
time taken, etc are important. These are called
metadata & there are three types of metadata
descriptions as RDF, EXIF & XML. More
details regarding these metadata are discussed
under the development environment section.
3.1.1. Geotagging Using RDF
Among this one research is carried out on
Geotagging images using RDF [1]. In this
approach, the spatial relations between nearby
images are discovered by means of inference
over their RDF descriptions. An interface is
created to interact & users can tag images,
metadata manually & share. When a
mechanism is provided to relate the images
accordingly, then the landscape & maps can be
transformed into multilayered virtual space. So
that the users can move through the time like
from day time to midnight, from one event to
another, one place to other, etc [1]. That
facilitates the user with massive information
regarding a place & efficient navigation.
Figure 1 shows the multi-layered map
interface.
Figure 1 - multi-layered map interface.
The RDF data are selected such that the
relation between the data can be secured
accordingly. Here Dublin Core (DC) standard
was used to describe author, title, date, time &
annotation about location. Latitude &
longitude is defined in both degree notation &
degree-minutes-seconds (DMS) notation. By
defining an image like this, whole information
regarding the image can be covered so that the
flexibility of using the image in various
applications will be increased.
3.1.2. Distributed Environments
The distributed environment is composed of a
set of clients & each client exposes its photo
collections to its peers using the SPARQL
(Query Language for RDF). Figure 2 shows
the connection between clients & when a
client requests pictures that have similar
coverage in geo-coding, SPARQL is used to
extract the related data. The metadata has all
the information regarding each image so that it
evaluates the metadata & creates a virtual
photo collection. Each relationship is added to
the RDF model & eventually client will have
all the corresponding related images from the
peers [1].
 Figure 2 – Distributed environment

Figure 3 – hierarchical photo annotation

3.2. Annotating Images Here photos are clustered into groups & assign
event label to denote main activity & each
Currently there are millions of images
photo is assigned a scene label. To make it
available in the web & recently most of them
more reliable, the researchers are considering
are geotagged. Each of them is stored at
on the correlation between scene labels. They
different photo collections, sites, databases,
use camera metadata to identify this
folders, etc. but these photos may be related to
information. Then consider the relation
each other in many ways. This characteristic is
between scene labels & event labels. As
neglected by many photo sites & researches.
showed in figure 4, the possibility of having
Now the researches are focusing on building
relations can be mapped.
relations between geotagged images based on
various heuristics.

3.2.1. Event Based Annotation

To consider the relation between each image,

the concept of events [9, 11] is used. In early
researches, event classification limited to
video analysis [24, 16] or sports activities. But
there are more general events that can be
derived from the images. With a collection of
photos it becomes possible to explore the
correlation between multiple photos [11].
In this approach an event label is given for a
group of photos that form the event & then by
considering the scenario each image is given a
scene label. Figure 3 shows the hierarchical
annotation of the scene & event models.
Figure 4 – scene labels & event labels
3.2.2. Object Recognition Using
Propagation of Geotag
In this approach considered on a large amount
of geotagged images & the propagation of the
image scenes. That means same image may
have different views depending on the place,
viewpoint the picture has taken [21].
Algorithms are developed such that to detect
the similar images & discard the duplicates.
This research is carried out for places like
castles, bridges, towers etc. considering a
dataset of well recognized places over the
world & sub locations within those places,
detection of the duplicates are done. Then a
same image can have many images from
different viewpoints. In this point, an original
image was kept to compare with other images
from the dataset & when matching found,
images are propagated. Figure 5 shows the
different views of the same place. So the
annotation is done using the matching of the
images in different views using the algorithm.
Figure 5 - image propagation
3.3. Text Based Geotagging
Geotagging requires geo-location specific data
mainly the name id the location. When tagging
images by looking at the names, there can be
mishaps between local & global level naming,
because a name may refer to different aspects
in each area. Therefore researches are
considering on developing spatial lexicon
system to indicate the locations [16]. Another
thing is that in a web content text based
Geotagging is very important. Text may refer
to many different aspects so that identifying &
relating them accordingly may be a
challenging task [5]. Here the focus of the web
pages are taken into consideration & according
to that Geotagging is achieved.
3.3.1. Geotagging With Local Lexicons
Developing spatial lexicon system to indicate
the locations is considered in this approach.
The vocabulary used by the locals is
considered here irrespective of the global
lexicon. In this approach, various methods of
writing like newspapers, blogs, articles which
use different spatial lexicons, are considered &
Geotagging unstructured data is taken into
account.
As same name can be defined in many ways in
different locations in the world, without
having a proper indexing based on the local
toponyms, it will be a great challenge to
geotag. For example, name ―Paris‖ can be
referred to ―Paris, France‖, ―Paris Miller‖,
―downtown Paris‖ likewise [16]. So the idea is
to define locally relevant lexicons first &
geotag them & then separate them from global
lexicons. Using local lexicons can describe
certain scenarios. For example as shown in
figure 4 twitter massages can be used to
describe the location based information.
Therefore local lexicons for Geotagging are an
important aspect in Geotagging.
Figure 6 – Traffic information using twitter
messages.
3.3.2. Geotagging Web Content
Ambiguity of text is a common thing when it
comes to web content. Some texts are geo
based while some texts are non-geo. Non-geo
text means these data cannot be geographically
identified for an example a name of a person,
book, mobile, etc. so geo/non-geo ambiguity
should be resolved in order to geotag the web
content. A research is carried out on the very
areas which can geotag the web content
according to the text [5]. This approach
employs the gazetteer approach. Its goal is to
identify all geographic mentions in web pages,
assign a geographic location & confidence
level to each, & derive a focus for the entire
page. By identifying all geographic data,
measuring the focus of the page can be
achieved.
The gazetteer contains a hierarchical view of
the world, divided into continents, countries,
States (for some countries), and cities. As
explained above, this hierarchy associates each
geographic entity (i.e., place) with a canonical
taxonomy node. Each place is also associated
with a number of names and/or abbreviations
—for example ―Alabama‖, ―AL‖ and ―Ala.‖
are all names of the same state. World
coordinates and a population estimate are also
assigned to each place, as these are useful in
the disambiguation algorithm [5]. Once the
content of the web page is identified, the page
focus identification can be done. Page focus is
very important in searching. For example if a
user is searching for California, rather than
finding multitude of pages that mention in
passing some city in California or pages that
all the states of the union. When several cities
are mentioned, algorithm finds the relation
between cities & if they are from same region,
then the page focus is determined as per the
region. Using the page focus predictions can
be done & these results can be used in news
web sites like dynamic contents.
3.4. Mining Differences from Geotagged
photos
From the millions of photos available in the
web, finding differences is definitely a
challenging task. Therefore Geotagging is
employed to insert more specific details on
those photos so that identification becomes
much easier among many of them. When
considering about the images, differences can
be vary accordingly such as culturally,
historically, timely, etc. So to identify the
differences geotagged images need to be
indexed & techniques to recognize the images
by its content. I.e. state-of-art objects
recognition technique developed by computer
vision research community [10].
For example mining the cultural differences
from geotagged images [10] will be an
important aspect when it comes to learning
environment & researching. So the same
object can be seen in different aspects with the
help of Geotagging. In this approach,
geotagged images from the Flickr is
considered & facilitate a system which can
automatically select relevant & representative
photographs foe the general object or scene
concepts in the worldwide dimensions.
Culturally related data can be in many forms
like foods, clothes, buildings, etc. therefore to
differentiate each category, representative
images should be employed. First clustering
techniques are applied to partition the image
set into similar groups. By evaluating the
intra-cluster densities & cluster member
numbers, irrelevant images can be discarded.
Then images are geographically clustered &
large geographic clusters are selected as
representative regions. So in this approach
culturally relevant data are grouped together
so that same object representation in different
regions in the world can be recognized. Figure
7 shows the difference between foods in
different regions [10].
Figure 7 – Clustering images culturally
Another research was carried out on global
collection of images using all information &
identifies automatically places that people
interested to photograph. Images are taken
from each photographer with the metadata. So,
eventually a large collection of images can be
retrieved which are taken by many
photographers, at different locations. So by
using this mapping technique photo
management sites like Flickr can automatically
suggest geotags, significantly reducing the
labor involved in adding geo-location
annotation. Also the common & famous places
can be identified by applications so that they
can use that information to suggest geotag for
Figure 8- Representative images on geotagged locations
3.5. Mobile Geotagging
Mobile Geotagging is becoming a very
popular event in today’s world as the
availability of the mobile devices. Now mobile
device inventors make sure to add built in
Geotagging facility; in other words GPS
facility. As most of the mobile phones are
coming with a camera, uploading the photos
into the web is an essential & popular event
among the users. Therefore there should be
mechanism to tag these images according to
the geo location, with some additional details.
Providing Geotagging facility to the mobile
devices made the world more efficient in
communicating. So the photo sharing becomes
more popular due to mobile Geotagging.
Mobile Geotagging includes secure
Geotagging [23], mobile
their users. The representative images are
shown as in figure 8 illustrates that each geo
location is well described using text, visual
images by giving a well known place as the
representation [4].
devices such as mobile phones, mobile GPS
devices [3].
3.6. Geotagging in Tourism
Tourism is a one of the industries which
evolve day by day in many aspects. Now the
tourism is becoming very familiar to the
people via the web. Many people get to know
about important places via the web. Therefore
traveling industries consider on internet based
strategies to market their travelling over the
world. In such researches are mostly based on
Geotagging [6]. Because images are the best
way to represent a place, location, moment, so
that using images over the web they can
market their products.
One such system is suggested in the research
paper ―A world wide tourism recommendation
system based on geotagged web photos” [12].
In this approach, first a large amount of
geotagged images are stored in a database &
cluster them into similar type of groups. Then
take the most representative images & tags.
These images & tags are used to determine the
location which the user is looking for. The
figure 9 shows the model of the system which
allows users to interact with & find the
suitable traveling places.
Figure 9 – Travel destination model
They suggest an interface which allows users
to interact & enter the place they need to go.
Then the system will give related images of
the place. For example if the search is about
beach, then number of representative images
are given along with the map [12]. This
system helps to find the user preference
toward tourism such that most visited places,
places people like most, etc can be identified.
So the travel agents can track these data &
make necessary arrangement to increase their
customers. That way Geotagging is very
helpful in tourism industry.
Another research is carried out the basis of
how past travelling experiences can be used to
suggest the places the tourists should be
looking into when they are planning to travel
next. In this approach the previous results of
each users travelling will be recorded &
analyses for the regions, locations, cities.
When a user has gone to Franco in London
then it will recommend o visit in another city
nearby these cities [15]. This is used to suggest
the places which user never visited before in a
certain place. In order to find the nearby places
Geotagging is employed. This is an intelligent
system which learns the user travel patterns &
suggests the traveling plans. Therefore in
traveling also Geotagging is an important tool
to make it a better industry.
4. Applications of Geotagging
There are many applications which employed
the Geotagging. Many of these applications
allow people to tag their images manually &
some tools to edit these images. As image
representation in the web is widely used, photo
sharing applications & tools are more tend
towards Geotagging. Not only that, when web
services are developing in Geotagging
environment, there are many devices to help
Geotag images on the go. Mobile devices are
now equipped with Geotagging facility in
order to cope with the community needs. Most
of these applications use Google Earth as the
map API to present the map for the users.
Therefore Google Maps are very much
incorporated with Geotagging process.
4.1. Flickr
Flickr is the most recognized photo sharing
application which is using the Geotagging for
photo sharing [1, 2, 13]. Flickr is equipped
with geotagged images other than the normal
images. These geotagged images are uploaded
by people all over the world. Flickr provides a
view of nearby pictures & a browser for
Geotagging & various tools are given to edit
the rest [1]. Anyone can log in to Flickr &
browse for favorite pictures & upload them to
Flickr. After that users can geotag the image
using the map provided with the application.
There users are given the map & can choose
the relevant place of the image & place it on
the map. Users are not required any technical
knowledge to geotag them as it is done
visually. That helps users to interact with the
application more & more thus that is why
Flickr is so popular among the world. Figure
10 shows geotagged image in Flickr.
Figure 10 – Geotagged image in Flickr.
4.2.Picasa
Picasa is another outstanding desktop
application for organizing digital photos which
enables Geotagging [19, 1]. Picasa can be used
to organize photo collections on a personal
computer by using the various facilities given.
As newer versions of Picasa enabled
Geotagging so that people can use it offline as
well. It is integrated with Google Earth &
Google earth is used to select the location of
the picture & the latitude & longitude
information are added to their metadata. To
geotag with Picasa user needs to install Google
Earth in the client machine. Then easily geotag
the images & upload into the web. Once the
user geotagged the location of the picture, the
geo cording will be automatically fixed by the
Google Maps. Users no need to know the geo-
cording & also user can view the nearby
images of the location which geotagged by
others. This way, people can recognize the
important places in the world via the
geotagged images. Figure 11 shows when a
user selected some pictures to be geotagged,
Picasa will ask to geotag them on the selected
location.
Figure 11 – Geotagging in Picasa.
4.3. Paintmap.com
Paintmap is a geolocation-oriented painting
sharing website with the following goals: on
one hand, it allows painters all around the
World to locate physically the subject painted
by others and learn about the artistic activity at
a given area. On the other hand, Paintmap
allows Google Earth users to complement the
physical and photographic knowledge of a
given area with the artistic descriptions
provided by users [20]. So that painters all
over the world can geotag their paintings
according to the location of the paint content,
author location, or any other relevant area.
This helps painters to market their paintings as
well as paint lovers to identify where to get
them.
4.4. Google Spread Sheets
Many of will confuse with this as Geotagging
in spread sheets doesn’t make any sense. But
today Google spread sheets are so developed
thus can geocode the locations within the
spread sheet & tag them on the map. For
example if a user typed a location address,
then user can geotag it by using the gadgets
provided with the spread sheets. Using the
gadget the locations which can be geotagged
will be automatically geotagged & user no
need to manually do it. So when the addresses
like street addresses are important, Google
spread sheets can be used to geotag them
easily.
4.5. CommunityWalk
CommunityWalk is a website that is dedicated
to providing a powerful yet simple and easy to
use interface for creating informational,
interactive, and engaging maps. With the
ability to show photos, add comments, display
interactive media, hide and show categories of
locations, explore hundreds of fantastic maps
of anything and everything, and so much
more, CommunityWalk is fast becoming the
destination site for creating and exploring the
most interesting maps on the Internet [14].
5. Development Environments & 5.2. GPS Geotagging Devices
Devices
When making applications that can be
geotagged, many technologies need to be used.
As Geotagging is basically about identifying
the location globally, the GPS or Global
Positioning System [18] is the major
technology to be used. GPS devices are
available to geotag media & many GPS
formats are used to identify images by
location. The formats differ from each other
on how the coordinates are stored to define the
location. Spatial metadata types are very
important in Geotagging & when need to
geotag a media such as an image, blog, etc;
usage of the metadata comes to play.
Depending on the purpose, usage, type the
metadata environment will be changed. As
there are many types of metadata choosing the
correct one depends on the type of the work.
5.1. GPS
GPS is the technique used to track the location
information with the time in the earth. It is a
global navigation satellite system which
operates by number of geo satellites. When the
LOS (Line of Sight) is available, geographic
information can be transmitted between the
satellites & the earth stations. A GPS receiver
calculates its position by precisely timing the
signals sent by GPS satellites high above the
Earth. Each satellite continually transmits
messages which include the time the message
was transmitted, precise orbital information, &
the general system health and rough orbits of
all GPS satellites [18]. GPS consists of three
major segments as Space Segment (SS),
Control Segment (CS) & User Segment (US).
Space segment includes the space satellites &
they are used for transmitting signals. Control
segment is responsible for controlling the
communication throughout the period & user
segment includes the handheld devices, GPS
receivers which are used to receive the GPS
signals from satellites [7].
There are number of devices available for
Geotagging the images just after taking them.
All these devices are capable of connecting
with satellites via GPS. These GPS devices
should have computer interface, USB
connection, serial cable, flash card as
minimum requirements. GPS device models
are Garmin, Magellan, etc. as these features
are included in cameras the best available
geotaggable cameras are, Ricoh 500E, Nikon
DSLR, Cannon & Trimble Juno SC can be
named. Not only cameras but also mobile
phones are emerging with Geotagging option.
Mobile phones like apple iphones are provided
software to geotag the images in the phone.
Many phones are having built-in GPS
receivers to enable Geotagging [22].
5.3. Metadata Representation
Metadata means the representation of an
image by the name, date taken, time, geo
locations, author, title, etc. when Geotagging
images this information are essential to track
the location correctly. In Geotagging these
metadata are called geospatial metadata. The
most commonly used metadata for Geotagging
is EXIF or Exchangeable Image File Format.
The primary feature of the EXIF is to record
camera information in an image file at the
point of capture. This information includes
camera model, serial, date; time & also the
above mentioned primary image data are
stored. Figure 12 shows a typical EXIF file
data configuration.
Figure 12 – EXIF data configuration
5.4. Metadata Tag Elements
When Geotagging, metadata can be manually
edited; & geo tag elements are important such
situations. The major metadata elements are
Latitude, Longitude & place name. Longitude
is the X coordinate on a Mercator map &
latitude is plotted as the Y coordinates. In the
metadata tags these are represented as
geo.position.
< META NAME = "geo.position‖ CONTENT
= "latitude; longitude" >
The place name & the region can be given in
the metadata tags as geo.placename &
geo.region.
<META NAME =‖geo.placename‖
CONTENT = ―Place Name‖ >
<META NAME =‖geo.region‖ CONTENT =
―Country code‖ >
6. Future Directions of Geotagging
The future with the geo-tagging will be like
when someone pull the mobile device & hold
it up, then on the screen appears name of the
restaurants surrounding the person, with their
types, rating, meal costs & directions. Then
clicking on a specific link will take to more
information. This kind of sophisticated
services are about to present to the users with
the aid of this great geo-tagging technology.
Military applications also become combined
with Geotagging in order to ensure the
accuracy of the locations as they require pin-
point accuracy on the targets. Worldwide
geographic vision is a must in future military
service to protect against the threats from the
rivals. Therefore the use of Geotagging in the
military applications would let them to find
almost all the places where threats can be
hidden. At the same time the privacy will be a
significant issue with the fast growing
technology as Geotagging can be done
anywhere, thus there will be many restrictions
in mobile world by creating more secure
environment for Geotagging.
7. Discussion
Earlier there was no such technology to
communicate over the space. With the time,
people felt the absence of a technology which
can used to identify the geo locations in the
world. Then the GPS technology was
discovered as a solution for that. With GPS
technology people could communicate with
satellites & get the correct geographic
locations anywhere in the earth. Then the web
was introduced & soon it was developing very
rapidly making it available with image sharing
sites as well. But there were no facilities to
add geographic locations to these images.
People needed geographic related data when
they were using web in day today life. To
address this issue of combining geo data into
web, the concept of Geotagging was
introduced.
The main purpose of this document is to give a
general idea about Geotagging concept and the
prevailing research works on the Geotagging.
The concept of Geotagging is rapidly
developing through the web because of the
efficiency of its usage. As Geotagging is an
interesting & important, useful feature, many
researchers are doing research on various
aspects to increase the efficiency of vivid
applications, processes & so on.
While doing this review I found that
Geotagging is emerging in number of areas
like mobile phones, handheld devices, web
applications, military applications, vehicles,
etc. most researches are about how to manage
Geotagging with the help of various devices,
manual Geotagging & automatic Geotagging
differentiation & processes are discussed.
Some research coves the aspect of how to
enrich geotag with the existing technologies &
employing them in the current applications.
Those findings are truly helpful to the other
researches to motivate themselves. The
development in GPS technology will be highly
affected to Geotagging in the future. The next
step for me is to review specific aspects in
Geotagging technologies such as geocording
& GPS technology to improve the knowledge
on this area.
8. Geotagging in Secure Environment
Geotagging is the process of adding
geographic related data to any media & make
them available to access in the web. In this
process the technological involvement is
highly affected on making Geotagging a
reality. Which means the technology must be
at the standards to support Geotagging in
many ways for the people to interact.
Therefore researches are carried out on finding
such techniques to help Geotagging. Along
with the GPS technology people could do lot
of works but still needed further development.
Integrating GPS into devices, making devices
which can be used with maps, identifying
methods that can employ Geotagging, are
some of the major areas which were
considered.
Today Geotagging is in sky high as it develops
in no-time. With the development of the
technology, the usage of Geotagging may lead
to some major issues for people. Because now
many mobile phones are having the facility to
geotag the images in the phone in a flash. This
facility can be misused in a way to harm the
identity of a person. For an instant, one can
take a privacy related image of a person or a
place & tag it in the web so that anybody can
access that image. So the location is revealed
to anybody. In some situations location hiding
is really important but with this Geotagging,
there will be no chance to hide. Cybercasting
can be a big threat in future world that is using
geotagged information embedded in the files
to mount attacks in the real world. So I
suppose that this will happen mostly by the
mobile devices. Therefore I suggest that a
mechanism should be implemented on
protecting the privacy of the people. For that
inventors can implement applications which
help users to decide on adding geographic
information. The applications should have
multiple options which allow users to decide
whether to add the location or not. That way
user can take the responsibility of keeping
his/her privacy rather giving it to decide to the
application.
Therefore future with Geotagging must be
secure & privacy should be ensured to make
the full use of the technology.
Acknowledgement
I give my sincere thanks to Dr. J.C
Balasooriya for giving me many advices as the
supervisor of the Independent Study, Level 3
& to Mr. Mifan Careem who helped me on
finding details on Geotagging & the friends
who helped me to find details regarding the
topic.
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