Flickr Shapefiles are a set of polygons generated from the geo-tags of photos on Flickr. Using the names assigned by people to their own images the dataset offers boundaries of loads of places around the world. The code.flickr blog has more info and details of their generation. The idea is that using people’s tags of locations to form boundaries gives a large dataset of where people think particular places are.

The Boundaries project uses Flick Shapefiles to show neighbourhoods and their neighbouring places. Other than that there isn’t a huge amount of examples on the web.  I’ve put together an example that uses ModestMaps and the Flickr API to display the Shapefiles in Flash. The polygons are retrieved using a bounding box query to the Flickr API, decoded from JSON, drawn and may be identified with a mouse hover.

It’s work in progress and a bit buggy in places but I’m hoping to add in some other useful features in future like a link to download a particular Shapefile. The aim is to eventually enable the entire viewport to be covered with the Flickr polygons. A couple of issues need to be overcome. Firstly, the Flickr API has a maximum bounding box size stopping the retrieval of many polygons. This should be straightforward to address by making multiple requests. Secondly, there will probably be performance issues arising from drawing so many Shapefiles, but that’s why I chose to use Flash over JS – it should be possible to draw more polygons efficiently.

A bit more detail on the code…
The program uses the flickr.places.placesForBoundingBox call of the Flickr API. This returns the information of places within a bounding box for a particular place type (neighbourhood, locality, county, region, country, continent). I’ve hard-coded it to neighbourhood scale for the moment, although zooming out to a country-level and moving outside cities does seem to load smaller scale areas. WOEIDs (Where on earth IDs) are used to display and identify places. The code also demonstrates how to get point (uses a custom class: CrossMarker.as) and polygon markers working ModestMaps. A zip of the AS3 files and .fla is available here and I hope to add the project to wonderfl soon.