Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems: An Examination of Tagging Practices (original) (raw)
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The dynamics and semantics of collaborative tagging
… of the 1st Semantic Authoring and …, 2006
The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classifications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including the dynamics of such systems and whether coherent classification schemes can emerge from undirected tagging by users. Currently millions of users are using collaborative tagging without centrally organizing principles, and many suspect this exhibits features considered to be indicative of a complex system. If this is the case, it remains to be seem whether collaborative tagging by users over time leads to emergent classification schemes that could be formalized into an ontology usable by the Semantic Web. This paper uses data from "popular" tagged sites on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of such collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we are trying to determine whether the distribution of tag frequencies stabilizes, which indicates a degree of cohesion or consensus among users about the optimal tags to describe particular sites. We use tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags and automatically create an ontology. We also produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to model and understand some of the basic dynamics behind the process.
Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems
Journal of Information Science, 2006
... 3. Delicious dynamics Del.icio.us, or Delicious, is a collaborative tagging system for web bookmarks that its creator, Joshua Schachter, calls a 'social bookmarks manager' [5]. We analyzed data from Delicious to uncover patterns among users, tags and URLs. ... T imes T ag Has B ...
The structure of collaborative tagging systems
Arxiv preprint cs/0508082, 2005
Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.
Journal of Information & Knowledge Management, 2010
This study investigates the contribution of collaborative tagging to the design of user-driven vocabularies in knowledge management systems (KMS). Three metrics, tag growth, tag reuse, and tag discrimination, were used to examine the evolution of the tagging vocabulary of the knowledge management community of interest in CiteULike over a three-year period. Results indicate a steady decrease in the number of unique tags over the four years, suggesting an increasing stability in the community vocabulary over time and the establishment of domain-specific vocabulary. Members reused each others' tags over time and exhibited increasingly collaborative tagging behaviour. Tag discrimination was high, with 4.11 distinct articles per tag. The stable and discriminatory nature of the community's tags suggests that collaborative tagging may serve as a useful resource for vocabulary choice or maintenance by KMS managers.
The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging
Proceedings of the 16th …, 2007
The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classifications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for "popular" sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags.
Social Tagging: Implications from Studying User Behavior and Institutional Practice
This paper aims to describe users' tagging behavior in catalogues and in Flickr. Six platforms of two institutions and one consortium are analyzed: the main catalogue Discovery and Flickr page of the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the main catalogue Explore, the catalogue Archives and Manuscripts and Flickr page of the British Library, and the consortial search engine of the pan-European eBooks on Demand Library Network. The results of the document and user data analysis point to differences between archival and library collections, between catalogues and Flickr, illustrate the impact of different authorization and procedural rules, and confirm previous studies as regards to the small size of the active user group. Based on the data analysis, we offer eight recommendations for social tagging in libraries and archives concerning the issues of interface functionality and management, data collection, reflection of tags and maintaining the community.
Vocabulary growth in collaborative tagging systems, 2007
We analyze a large-scale snapshot of del.icio.us and investigate how the number of different tags in the system grows as a function of a suitably defined notion of time. We study the temporal evolution of the global vocabulary size, i.e. the number of distinct tags in the entire system, as well as the evolution of local vocabularies, that is the growth of the number of distinct tags used in the context of a given resource or user. In both cases, we find power-law behaviors with exponents smaller than one. Surprisingly, the observed growth behaviors are remarkably regular throughout the entire history of the system and across very different resources being bookmarked. Similar sub-linear laws of growth have been observed in written text, and this qualitative universality calls for an explanation and points in the direction of non-trivial cognitive processes in the complex interaction patterns characterizing collaborative tagging.
An activity-based perspective of collaborative tagging
… on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder …, 2007
Collaborative tagging offers an interesting framework for studying online activity as users, topics (tags), and resources (bookmarks) get associated with each other through a folksonomy. In this paper, we consider an activity-based perspective of collaborative tagging where activity is defined as the act of associating a tag with a bookmark by a user. The perspective categorizes activities based on two defined measures: intensity and spread, which indicate the level and range, respectively, of the tagging activity, measured for both users and tags.