TagMaps is the latest research project to come out of my group at YRB. It is a visualization technique that displays text on geographic maps. TagMaps can be used to communicate characteristics of location-based data in an easy-to-understand way. The World Explorer in particular uses TagMaps to display Flickr tags that denote the ‘important’ tags in any given geographical area. You can play with it at http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/worldexplorer.php
I built much of the back end for the system and am in charge of the data apis that we uses. If you want to play with this API for yourself I suggest you head over to either the Yahoo Developer Network or to the TagMaps Yahoo group.
For more info on TagMaps check out the post on the YRB blog.
