Thanks to a Twitter tweet from Silvia Tolisano earlier today, I checked out a terrific resource that I hadn’t seen.  It’s a remarkable search tool that’s been around for almost a year; and this illustrates two things.  First, there is so much goodness online that it’s impossible to keep on top of it all.  Secondly, it underscores the value of the sharing that happens on Twitter.

Tag Galaxy is an application where folksonomy, Flickr, and creative three-dimensional presentation come together in a way that is highly effective.  The net result is an intuitive visual way to search for images on Flickr and to see the relationships between tags.

You enter a tag into a search box,  and that tag becomes a “sun”  that is orbited by a “galaxy” of related tags. The related tags are presented as planets orbiting the sun. If you wish to combine tags, you simply click on  an orbiting tag and create a new sun with its own galaxy of related tags.

Once you have the desired tag, or combination of tags, you click on the planet you’ve created to view a globe of related images, as shown in the screenshot below for the tags Himalayas and Nepal.  (This globe shows the first 235 of the 17,994 Flickr images tagged Himalayas and Nepal!) The globe can be tilted, rotated, and spun in any direction to find and select an image.