Supporting Image Search with Tag Clouds: A Preliminary Approach

Algorithms and techniques for searching in collections of data address a challenging task, since they have to bridge the gap between the ways in which users express their interests, through natural language expressions or keywords, and the ways in which data is represented and indexed. When the collections of data include images, the task becomes harder, mainly for two reasons. From one side the user expresses his needs through one medium (text) and he will obtain results via another medium (some images). From the other side, it can be difficult for a user to understand the results retrieved; that is why a particular image is part of the result set. In this case, some techniques for analyzing the query results and giving to the users some insight into the content retrieved are needed. In this paper, we propose to address this problem by coupling the image result set with a tag cloud of words describing it. Some techniques for building the tag cloud are introduced and two application scenarios are discussed.