An online image annotation service for destination image measurement

This research note reports on the first, to the best of the author’s knowledge, release of an online image annotation service for destination image measurement. Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) today, while actively data mining textual content for insights into visitor sentiment towards their destination or the most popular topics or themes of visitors at that destination, increasingly face usage of digital imagery or videos - yet non-textual content is not as easily ‘understood’ by machines to provide the same insights. The recent emergence of online services for image annotation might be of value to DMOs and researchers but their genericity means that to date e-tourism researchers continue to use manual approaches to media annotation, unable to scale to larger data sets and inconsistent across efforts with respect to chosen visual categories and concepts. We present here initial results which indicate that researchers and organisations could use an online service tuned specifically to the detection of visual concepts related to destination image, allowing them to annotate media at greater scale and analyse and compare results according to a common annotation vocabulary, helping us progress further in this exciting new area of e-tourism research and Tourism Intelligence.