Tagasauris is a technology startup company that was founded in December 2010. Tagasauris provides media annotation services and uses a combination of crowdsourcing and machine intelligence to identify key tags and characteristics of the media object that is being annotated.

Tagasauris is providing photo tagging services to Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo...

, in order to allow 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 provide descriptive tags to the images.

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

American Graffiti

American Graffiti is a 1973 coming of age film co-written/directed by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford...

: While the crowdsourced workers could easily identify the individuals (e.g., George Lucas

George Lucas

George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...

, Ron Howard

Ron Howard

Ronald William "Ron" Howard is an American actor, director, and producer. He came to prominence as a child actor, playing Opie Taylor in the sitcom The Andy Griffith Show for eight years, and later the teenaged Richie Cunningham in the sitcom Happy Days for six years...

, Richard Dreyfuss

Richard Dreyfuss

Richard Stephen Dreyfuss is an American actor best known for starring in a number of film, television, and theater roles since the late 1960s, including the films American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goodbye Girl, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Stakeout, Always, What About...

, and Mackenzie Phillips

Mackenzie Phillips

Mackenzie Phillips is an American actress and singer best known for her roles in American Graffiti and as rebellious teenager Julie Cooper Horvath on the sitcom One Day at a Time...

, 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. Tagasauris found nearly two dozen previously lost photos taken on the film’s set. "Computers couldn’t ID humans in the photo but humans couldn’t know the context."