Collaborative tagging as a knowledge organisation and resource discovery tool

The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the collaborative tagging phenomenon and explore some of the reasons for its emergence. Design/methodology/approach - The paper reviews the related literature and discusses some of the problems associated with, and the potential of, collaborative tagging approaches for knowledge organisation and general resource discovery. A definition of controlled vocabularies is proposed and used to assess the efficacy of collaborative tagging. An exposition of the collaborative tagging model is provided and a review of the major contributions to the tagging literature is presented. Findings - There are numerous difficulties with collaborative tagging systems (e.g. low precision, lack of collocation, etc.) that originate from the absence of properties that characterise controlled vocabularies. However, such systems can not be dismissed. Librarians and information professionals have lessons to learn from the interactive and social aspects exemplified by collaborative tagging systems, as well as their success in engaging users with information management. The future co-existence of controlled vocabularies and collaborative tagging is predicted, with each appropriate for use within distinct information contexts: formal and informal. Research limitations/implications - Librarians and information professional researchers should be playing a leading role in research aimed at assessing the efficacy of collaborative tagging in relation to information storage, organisation, and retrieval, and to influence the future development of collaborative tagging systems. Practical implications - The paper indicates clear areas where digital libraries and repositories could innovate in order to better engage users with information. Originality/value - At time of writing there were no literature reviews summarising the main contributions to the collaborative tagging research or debate

Collaborative tagging as a tripartite network

We describe online collaborative communities by tripartite networks, the nodes being persons, items and tags. We introduce projection methods in order to uncover the structures of the networks, i.e. communities of users, genre families... To do so, we focus on the correlations between the nodes, depending on their profiles, and use percolation techniques that consist in removing less correlated links and observing the shaping of disconnected islands. The structuring of the network is visualised by using a tree representation. The notion of diversity in the system is also discussed

A BANKING COLLABORATIVE TAGGING SYSTEM

The paper presents the collaborative systems classification by field of application. There are described the collaborative tagging systems and an implementation of this kind of systems is analyzed in a commercial bank. The Collaborative Multicash Servicedesk application is presented in order to implement an auto-complete facility.collaborative systems, tagging, auto-complete, banking, application

Analyzing Tag Semantics Across Collaborative Tagging Systems

The objective of our group was to exploit state-of-the-art Information Retrieval methods for finding associations and dependencies between tags, capturing and representing differences in tagging behavior and vocabulary of various folksonomies, with the overall aim to better understand the semantics of tags and the tagging process. Therefore we analyze the semantic content of tags in the Flickr and Delicious folksonomies. We find that: tag context similarity leads to meaningful results in Flickr, despite its narrow folksonomy character; the comparison of tags across Flickr and Delicious shows little semantic overlap, being tags in Flickr associated more to visual aspects rather than technological as it seems to be in Delicious; there are regions in the tag-tag space, provided with the cosine similarity metric, that are characterized by high density; the order of tags inside a post has a semantic relevance

Collaborative tagging supported knowledge discovery

Web 2.0 has brought about a new sort of user centred services which rely a great deal on flexible organizational capabilities designed for user-supplied organization. Collaborative tagging is especially interesting in this context and this article explores what this kind of organization in connection with some Web 2.0 principles means for knowledge discovery in various ways. To fully explore this, the article defines collaborative tagging and gives an overview of collaborative tagging in general, of services using it and of tags themselves. It concludes with mechanisms this kind of approach to knowledge organization provides for knowledge discovery