This paper describes the general photographic retrieval and object annotation tasks of the ImageCLEF 2006 evaluation campaign. These tasks provide both the resources and the framework necessary to perform comparative laboratory-style evaluation of visual information systems for image retrieval and automatic image annotation. Both tasks offer something new for 2006 and attracted a large number of submissions: 12 groups participating in ImageCLEFphoto and 3 in the automatic annotation task. This paper summarises components used in the benchmark, including the collections, the search and annotation tasks, the submissions from participating groups, and results. The general photographic retrieval task, ImageCLEFphoto, used a new collection – the IAPR-TC12 Benchmark – of 20,000 colour photographs with semi-structured captions in English and German. This new collection replaces the St Andrews collection of historic photographs used for the previous three years. For ImageCLEFphoto groups submitted mainly text-only runs. However, 31 % of runs involved some kind of visual retrieval technique, typically combined with text through the merging of image and

In this paper, we present a preliminary study of geographic query words, which users ’ tend to re-use. The categories of the words demonstrate that geographically related words take up the largest proportion of all repeated words. These geo-words refer to a range of spatial areas. In addition, it was found that different geo-word types are re-used in different ways by users.

Geography is becoming increasingly important in web search. Search engines can often return better results to users by analyzing features such as user location or geographic terms in web pages and user queries. This is also of great commercial value as it enables location specific advertising and improved search for local businesses. As a result, major search companies have invested significant resources into geographic search technologies, also often called local search. This paper studies geographic search queries, i.e., text queries such as “hotel new york ” that employ geographical terms in an attempt to restrict results to a particular region or location. Our main motivation is to identify opportunities for improving geographical search and related technologies, and we perform an analysis of 36 million queries of the recently released AOL query trace. First, we identify typical properties of geographic search (geo) queries based on a manual examination of several thousand queries. Based on these observations, we build a classifier that separates the trace into geo and non-geo queries. We then investigate the properties of geo queries in more detail, and relate them to web sites and users associated with such queries. We also propose a new taxonomy for geographic search queries.