Clues of Personal Events in Online 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 organise and structure media around events. While this increased interest for events as the central aggregator when organising 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 collection. In this paper, we explore how users share photos online and discuss the results of a preliminary automatic processing of the data collected. We 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, or by using an event-centric vocabulary.