iCLEF 2006 Overview: Searching the Flickr WWW Photo-Sharing Repository.

This paper summarizes the task design for iCLEF 2006 (the CLEF interactive track). Compared to previous years, we proposed a radically new task: searching images in a naturally multilingual database, Flickr, which has millions of photographs shared by people all over the planet, tagged and described in a wide variety of languages. Participants were expected to build a multilingual search front-end to Flickr (using Flickr’s search API) and study the behaviour of the users for a given set of searching tasks. The emphasis was put on studying the process, rather than evaluating its outcome