Are you ready for smellfie?

London, Amsterdam, Barcelona. These cities already have their own scent maps. Photo tags and captions from sites such as Flickr and Instagram were used to create a olfactory landscape of the city . Scent maps of urban areas Daniele Quercia and her team at the University of Cambridge used data from these sites to design olfactory maps of cities and towns. The maps capture everything from the stench of sewers and animal excrement to fragrant fruit and vegetable markets, freshly mown lawns in public parks, and the garlicky wafts from restaurants. "Smellfies", or personalized maps The system can lead you to some unusual locations. Automatically generated online maps allow you to plot routes based not on the shortest distance, but on the smells you want to experience (or avoid). Whether you're walking, jogging, or cycling, the maps have a very apt name: "Smellfies." 3 years of work "Smellfies" is the brainchild of artist and designer Kate Mclean of the Royal College of Art in London, who spent three years updating the aroma lexicon. McLean gathered volunteers from New York and Amsterdam. She asked them to sniff everything at specific locations, from garbage to manhole covers to park benches. They then had to draw maps. This allowed her to create an olfactory dictionary consisting of 285 words commonly used to describe urban odors. Manually mapping aromas was tedious and slow work. So the researchers opted for a faster method: captions and tags from photos on Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr. Geotags from Barcelona and London The team collected geotags from 500,000 Flickr images, 35,000 Instagram photos, and 113,000 tweets. The tags and tweets were matched to words from a olfactory dictionary. The olfactory maps were presented at a conference in Oxford last May. The creators also attempted to correlate the collected data with a well-known air quality index in London. They found that pleasant natural smells mask air pollution. The project's authors hope their findings will help improve air quality management.