Of course we share! Testing Assumptions about Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in today's web and have attracted the interest from our research community in a variety of investigations. The overall vision of our community is that simply through interactions with the system, i.e., through tagging and sharing of resources, users would contribute to building useful semantic structures as well as resource indexes using uncontrolled vocabulary not only due to the easy-to-use mechanics. Henceforth, a variety of assumptions about social tagging systems have emerged, yet testing them has been difficult due to the absence of suitable data. In this work we thoroughly investigate three available assumptions - e.g., is a tagging system really social? - by examining live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system BibSonomy. Our empirical results indicate that while some of these assumptions hold to a certain extent, other assumptions need to be reflected and viewed in a very critical light. Our observations have implications for the design of future search and other algorithms to better reflect the actual user behavior

Exploring The Value Of Folksonomies For Creating Semantic Metadata

Finding good keywords to describe resources is an on-going problem: typically we select such words manually from a thesaurus of terms, or they are created using automatic keyword extraction techniques. Folksonomies are an increasingly well populated source of unstructured tags describing web resources. This paper explores the value of the folksonomy tags as potential source of keyword metadata by examining the relationship between folksonomies, community produced annotations, and keywords extracted by machines. The experiment has been carried-out in two ways: subjectively, by asking two human indexers to evaluate the quality of the generated keywords from both systems; and automatically, by measuring the percentage of overlap between the folksonomy set and machine generated keywords set. The results of this experiment show that the folksonomy tags agree more closely with the human generated keywords than those automatically generated. The results also showed that the trained indexers preferred the semantics of folksonomy tags compared to keywords extracted automatically. These results can be considered as evidence for the strong relationship of folksonomies to the human indexer’s mindset, demonstrating that folksonomies used in the del.icio.us bookmarking service are a potential source for generating semantic metadata to annotate web resources

Tagging, Folksonomy & Co - Renaissance of Manual Indexing?

This paper gives an overview of current trends in manual indexing on the Web. Along with a general rise of user generated content there are more and more tagging systems that allow users to annotate digital resources with tags (keywords) and share their annotations with other users. Tagging is frequently seen in contrast to traditional knowledge organization systems or as something completely new. This paper shows that tagging should better be seen as a popular form of manual indexing on the Web. Difference between controlled and free indexing blurs with sufficient feedback mechanisms. A revised typology of tagging systems is presented that includes different user roles and knowledge organization systems with hierarchical relationships and vocabulary control. A detailed bibliography of current research in collaborative tagging is included.Comment: Preprint. 12 pages, 1 figure, 54 reference

Link creation and profile alignment in the aNobii social network

The present work investigates the structural and dynamical properties of aNobii\footnote{http://www.anobii.com/}, a social bookmarking system designed for readers and book lovers. Users of aNobii provide information about their library, reading interests and geographical location, and they can establish typed social links to other users. Here, we perform an in-depth analysis of the system's social network and its interplay with users' profiles. We describe the relation of geographic and interest-based factors to social linking. Furthermore, we perform a longitudinal analysis to investigate the interplay of profile similarity and link creation in the social network, with a focus on triangle closure. We report a reciprocal causal connection: profile similarity of users drives the subsequent closure in the social network and, reciprocally, closure in the social network induces subsequent profile alignment. Access to the dynamics of the social network also allows us to measure quantitative indicators of preferential linking.Comment: http://www.iisocialcom.org/conference/socialcom2010

The state of research on folksonomies in the field of Library and Information Science : a Systematic Literature Review

Purpose – The purpose of this thesis is to provide an overview of all relevant peer-reviewed articles on folksonomies, social tagging and social bookmarking as knowledge organisation systems within the field of Library and Information Science by reviewing the current state of research on these systems of managing knowledge. Method – I use the systematic literature review method in order to systematically and transparently review and synthesise data extracted from 39 articles found through the discovery system LUBsearch in order to find out which, and to which degree different methods, theories and systems are represented, which subfields can be distinguished, how present research within these subfields is and which larger conclusions can be drawn from research conducted between 2003-2013 on folksonomies. Findings – There have been done many studies which are exploratory or reviewing literature discussions, and other frequently used methods which have been used are questionnaires or surveys, although often in conjunction with other methods. Furthermore, out of the 39 studies, 22 were quantitative, 15 were qualitative and 2 used mixed methods. I also found that there were an underwhelming number of theories being explicitly used, where merely 11 articles explicitly used theories, and only one theory was used twice. No key authors on the topic were identified, though Knowledge Organization, Information Processing & Management and Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology were recognised as key journals for research on folksonomies. There have been plenty of studies on how tags and folksonomies have effected other knowledge organisation systems, or how pre-existing have been used to create new systems. Other well represented subfields include studies on the quality or characteristics of tags or text, and studies aiming to improve folksonomies, search methods or tags. Value – I provide an overview on what has been researched and where the focus on said research has been during the last decade and present future research suggestions and identify possible dangers to be wary of which I argue will benefit folksonomies and knowledge organisation as a whole

Exploring the Structure of Library and Information Science Web Space Based on Multivariate Analysis of Social Tags

Introduction. This study examines the structure of Web space in the field of library and information science using multivariate analysis of social tags from the Website, Delicious.com. A few studies have examined mathematical modelling of tags, mainly examining tagging in terms of tri-partite graphs, pattern tracing and descriptive statistics. This study is one of the few studies to employ multivariate analysis in investigating dimensions of Web spaces based on social tagging data. Method. This study examines the post data collected from a set of library and information science related Websites bookmarked on Delicious.com using a Web crawler. Post data consist of the URL, usernames, tags and comments assigned by users of Delicious.com. The collected tag data were analysed based on multivariate methods, such as multidimensional scaling and structural equation modelling. Analysis. Collected data were first analysed using multidimensional scaling to explore initial relationships amongst the selected Websites. Then, confirmatory factor analysis based on structural equation modelling was employed to examine the hierarchical structure of the library & information science Web space. Results. Social tag data exhibit different dimensions in the Web space of the library and information science field. In addition, social tags confirmed the hierarchical structure of the field by showing significantly stronger relationships between the sites with similar characteristics. That is, the structure of the tagging data shows similar connections to those present in the real world. Conclusions. This study suggests a new statistical approach in social tagging and Web space analysis studies. Tag information can be used to explain the hierarchical structure of a certain domain. Methodologically, this study suggests that structural equation modelling can be a compelling method to explore hierarchal structures of nodes on the Web space

Collective dynamics of social annotation

The enormous increase of popularity and use of the WWW has led in the recent years to important changes in the ways people communicate. An interesting example of this fact is provided by the now very popular social annotation systems, through which users annotate resources (such as web pages or digital photographs) with text keywords dubbed tags. Understanding the rich emerging structures resulting from the uncoordinated actions of users calls for an interdisciplinary effort. In particular concepts borrowed from statistical physics, such as random walks, and the complex networks framework, can effectively contribute to the mathematical modeling of social annotation systems. Here we show that the process of social annotation can be seen as a collective but uncoordinated exploration of an underlying semantic space, pictured as a graph, through a series of random walks. This modeling framework reproduces several aspects, so far unexplained, of social annotation, among which the peculiar growth of the size of the vocabulary used by the community and its complex network structure that represents an externalization of semantic structures grounded in cognition and typically hard to access

Public bookmarks and private benefits: An analysis of incentives in social computing

Users of social computing websites are both producers and consumers of the information found on the site. This creates a novel problem for web-based software applications: how can website designers induce users to produce information that is useful for others? We study this question by interviewing users of the social bookmarking website del.icio.us. We find that for the users in our sample, metadata reflecting who bookmarked a webpage better supports information seeking than free-form keyword metadata (tags). We explain this finding by describing differences in the way that the design of del.icio.us motivates users to contribute by providing personal benefits for bookmarking and tagging.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61317/1/1450440240_ftp.pd