Tagasauris

Tagasauris
IndustryCrowdsourcing, Semantic Web, Media and Entertainment, Social Production
FoundedDecember 2010
Headquarters
New York, New York
,
USA
ServicesMedia Annotation, Semantic Enrichment, Named Entity Recognition, Video
Websitehttp://tagasauris.com/

Tagasauris is a technology startup company that was founded in New York City in December 2010. Tagasauris provides media annotation services and uses a combination of crowdsourcing, gamification, machine intelligence, and semantics to create and discover key tags for characteristics of the media object that is being annotated.[1]

Tagasauris provided photo tagging services to Magnum Photos, allowing the digital archive of Magnum to be searchable. The project allowed volunteers to get early access to the (untagged) photo archive of Magnum Photos, and provides descriptive, semantic tags to the images.[2][3][4][5][6]

A notable accomplishment for Tagasauris, achieved through a combination of machine and human intelligence, was the discovery of a set of "lost" photos in the Magnum archive, from the shooting of the movie American Graffiti:[7] While the crowdsourced workers could easily identify the individuals (e.g., George Lucas, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, and Mackenzie Phillips, shown in separate photos from one shooting), the underlying machine processes connected these together to see what is common among them. The film American Graffiti was one of the suggestions.[8] Tagasauris found nearly two dozen unkeyworded photos taken on the film's set. "Computers couldn’t ID humans in the photo but humans couldn’t know the context."[9]

  1. ^ Bud Mathaisel and Galen Gruman. Getting past the hype of gamification PWC Technology Forecast (Fall 2012).
  2. ^ Estrin, James. "Crowd-Sourcing the Magnum Archive" New York Times (July 26, 2011).
  3. ^ Russeth, Andrew. "Good Morning! Creative Thinking Edition" New York Observer (August 29, 2011).
  4. ^ "Magnum appelle à "taguer" ses archives" Le Monde (August 15, 2011)(in French)
  5. ^ Jarvis, Alice-Azania "Who, what, where? Magnum is hoping the modern crowd will help them identify a historic archive" The Independent (August 5, 2011)
  6. ^ Grundvig, James Graphing the Spillway of Big Data: Interview With Tagasauris CEO Todd Carter Huffington Post. (October 17, 2012)
  7. ^ Benenson, Fred. "Hidden Treasure: Lost Photos From the Set of American Graffiti" Wired (July 2011).
  8. ^ Mims, Christopher. "How Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Unearthed Lost Photos From American Graffiti" Technology Review (June 20, 2011).
  9. ^ Weise, Karen. "Humans Plus Computers Equals Better Crowdsourcing" Bloomberg Businessweek (November 10, 2011).