Among the useful information that make browsing or finding pictures on the Web easier, geographic data take advantages from the growing amount of geo-referenced image collections and recent map-based interfaces (Google Map and Earth, Yahoo! Map, etc.). Most large scale systems for visualizing geographic entities are weakly structured (unless for commercial entities), with inhomogeneous coverage; they also make little or no use of image processing techniques in search and retrieval. In this

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... , we tackle with these problems by introducing a enriched and adapted version of a geographical database and content-based facility in a new map-based visualization tool, called ThemExplorer. We present the system and evaluate different dimensions, proving its usefulness for browsing geo-referenced images. In section 1 we set up the global argument; in section 2, we discuss related work; section 3 includes an architectural overview of ThemExplorer; in Section 4, we present the contribution of our geographical database using heterogeneous sources on the Web; in section 5, we detail the CBIR techniques associated to ThemExplorer. Before concluding and presenting some future works, we describe a series of evaluation in section 6.