Wipley, Social Gaming Platform

This week, our development team has improved FlickrBabel. Most of new functionalities are related to geolocation:

1.- Now you can restrict searches according to a certain location

2.- Fixed a bug related to translations with non english characters

3.- Now, you can see tags and geolocation when displaying the photographies. You can also perform searches by tags clicking on them

4.- Improved the search for phoographies near a certain one

5.- Some visual improvements

The development team continues working hard on Wipley. While, and using spare time, they have performed some improvements on FlickrBabel.

• The GUI is implemented in 2 languages: English and Spanish. However, FlickrBabel uses another 2 languages (German and French) for expanding user queries.
• The result’s interface shows the results photographies but also the translation of the query into the 4 languages it uses internally.
• The results that includes geolocalization, now are marked with a ‘G’, and you can access directly from them to a map where the photo is geolocated.

By the end, now FlickrBabel has a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/flickrbabel) that will be used as “changelog” and also as an aggregator for all the news related to FlickrBabel.

The first application we have developed is FlickrBabel, a service to help in multimedia information retrieval, first using Flickr. The operative and utility of this tool is very simple. When a query is given to the system, it generates translations (by means of Google Translation API) to other languages (Spanish and English, by the momento) and it creates an expanded query with these translations. Finally, it generates the query using Flickr API (we use phpFlickr class for interacting with Flickr from PHP) and shows the results. servicio de ayuda a la búsqueda de fotografías en Flickr. El funcionamiento y utilidad de esta herramienta es muy simple.

As well as expanding queries by means of automated translation, FlickrBabel is able to search for related photographies using the contextual information attached to a given Flickr photo. When a photographie is geotagged, FlickrBabel also shows the photographies taken near from that location as a way to expand the vision of some places.

FlickrBabe borned as a satellite application when exploring several web services APIs trying to understand better how they work to use that knowledge in Wipley development. For getting a deeper knowledge from that APIs, nothing better than doing something practical, and this is the first result. By now,  FlickrBabel is at a “beta” stage, so we will add some functionalities from time to time.