Social bookmarking and tagging behavior: an empirical analysis on delicious and connotea

Social bookmarking services have shown themselves as common and popular Internet tools by successfully acquiring millions of users, with Delicious being one of the most popular social bookmarking services to the public. While Delicious is used mainly for general purposes, Connotea, another social bookmarking site that primarily serves academic and scientific interests, has become equally popular among researcher groups. This paper attempts to analyze and compare users’ bookmarking and tagging behavior in Connotea and Delicious. The results show that there is a distinctive difference in usage behavior among these two groups of users. Delicious users create bookmarks more frequently than Connotea users, but Connotea users tend to use more distinctive tags for their bookmarks than Delicious users. Moreover, our result from the analysis indicates that the number of bookmarks created is a significant predictor of the quantity of tags used. This study is a starting point from which to explore the reasons behind the difference in social bookmarking and tagging behavior among different usage orientation groups.postprintThe 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM 2009), Hong Kong, 3-4 December 2009. In Proceedings of the ICKM, 2009, p. 1-1

Social bookmarking and tagging behavior: an empirical analysis on delicious and connotea

Social bookmarking services have shown themselves as common and popular Internet tools by successfully acquiring millions of users, with Delicious being one of the most popular social bookmarking services to the public. While Delicious is used mainly for general purposes, Connotea, another social bookmarking site that primarily serves academic and scientific interests, has become equally popular among researcher groups. This paper attempts to analyze and compare users’ bookmarking and tagging behavior in Connotea and Delicious. The results show that there is a distinctive difference in usage behavior among these two groups of users. Delicious users create bookmarks more frequently than Connotea users, but Connotea users tend to use more distinctive tags for their bookmarks than Delicious users. Moreover, our result from the analysis indicates that the number of bookmarks created is a significant predictor of the quantity of tags used. This study is a starting point from which to explore the reasons behind the difference in social bookmarking and tagging behavior among different usage orientation groups.postprintThe 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM 2009), Hong Kong, 3-4 December 2009. In Proceedings of the ICKM, 2009, p. 1-1

Social bookmarking: an empirical analysis of connotea users’ perspectives

This study examined the perspectives of experienced and inexperienced users of Connotea in terms of reported bookmarking behaviors, perceived usefulness of social bookmarking in information discovery and management, and perceived usefulness of particular Connotea features. A convenience sample of experienced (n=30) and inexperienced users (n=32) responded to an online survey. The questionnaire utilized a 4-point Likert scale to examine the respondents’ opinions. The findings showed that both experienced and inexperienced users of Connotea perceived social bookmarking to be useful for information discovery and management. They also perceived the features and policies of Connotea to be useful for their personal purposes. However, the reported frequencies of usage indicated that the extent of use of social bookmarking may not be substantial. Experienced users were also found to use social bookmarking for managing relevant websites while inexperienced users still preferred to use traditional bookmarking in dedicated computers. These findings have potential implications on the development and use of social bookmarking services. Through our results, we provided information on the human factors that may be considered for further improvement of social bookmarking applications.published_or_final_versionThe 2010 CITE Research Symposium on 'e-Learning Design and Designs for Learning', the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 4-6 March 2010

Identidad folksonómica de la comunidad Ethnicity en Flickr : aproximación ciberetnográfica a los procesos de etiquetado social

110 páginas.Trabajo de Máster Oficial en Comunicación y Educación Audiovisual. Universidad Internacional de Andalucía / Universidad de Huelva. Director: Dr. Ramón Tirado Morueta. Se repasan las características del modelo folksonómico como propuesta representacionista que busca la contextualidad e interconexión sociocultural entre los dominios de conocimiento. Se estudian los preceptos discursivos de disciplinas como la Cibersemiótica, la Visualización del Conocimiento, el Análisis de redes sociales y la Etnografía virtual para comprender, desde sus esencias, una parte importante del escenario transdisciplinar de las folksonomías. Se presenta, desde esta transversalidad, una aproximación ciberetnográfica a cómo se suceden los procesos de etiquetado social en la comunidad de práctica Ethnicity del marcador social Flickr. Se estudiaron 705 imágenes agregadas por los 80 miembros del grupo lo cual ha permitido visualizar un escenario que fomenta la agregación, representación y socialización de recursos de conocimiento. A partir del análisis de co-palabras se estudiaron las 9027 etiquetas descriptivas aportadas por la comunidad para identificar los principales intereses temáticos Ethnicity

Content metadata created by users and information professionals: a comparative analysis

The master thesis is focused on professional and user-generated metadata with emphasis on content metadata. It describes metadata in general, their important characteristics, functions, and types, and defines other related terms. The professional content metadata and user-generated metadata are described in more detail. The analytical part aims to compare professional and user-generated content metadata. For this purpose, a dataset of metadata statements on fiction books collected from dozens of databases was used. It also aims to determine whether user-generated metadata bring additional information to metadata created by professionals.Diplomová práce pojednává o profesionálních a uživatelských metadatech, zejména se zaměřuje na metadata obsahová. Jsou zde popsána metadata obecně, jejich důležité charakteristiky, funkce a typy. Detailněji jsou popsána profesionální obsahová metadata a uživatelská metadata, definovány jsou také další termíny, které jsou v práci využívány. Cílem analytické části bylo porovnání profesionálních a uživatelských obsahových metadat. Probíhalo za pomoci souboru obsahových metadatových výroků popisujících beletristické knihy a sebraných z několika desítek databází. Zároveň bylo cílem analýzy určit, zda existují některá uživatelská metadata, která přinášejí nové informace oproti metadatům profesionálním.Institute of Information Studies and LibrarianshipÚstav informačních studií a knihovnictvíFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art

Towards Better Understanding of Folksonomic Patterns

Folksonomies provide a free source of keywords describing web resources; however, these keywords are free form and their semantics spans multiple contextual dimension. In this paper, we present a pragmatic experiment that analyzes folksonomy tags using three classification categories: Personal, Factual and Subjective, in order to gain more understanding of the types of tags used in the social tagging process. The rational for this work was to measure the potential portion of folksonomy tags that might be helpful when considering the creation of structured metadata

O desafio da homogeneização normativa em instituições de memória: proposta de um modelo uniformizador e colaborativo

Doutoramento em Informação e Comunicação em Plataformas DigitaisA informação digitalizada e nado digital, fruto do avanço tecnológico proporcionado pelas Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação (TIC), bem como da filosofia participativa da Web 2.0, conduziu à necessidade de reflexão sobre a capacidade de os modelos atuais, para a organização e representação da informação, de responder às necessidades info-comunicacionais assim como o acesso à informação eletrónica pelos utilizadores em Instituições de Memória. O presente trabalho de investigação tem como objetivo a conceção e avaliação de um modelo genérico normativo e harmonizador para a organização e representação da informação eletrónica, num sistema de informação para o uso de utilizadores e profissionais da informação, no contexto atual colaborativo e participativo. A definição dos objetivos propostos teve por base o estudo e análise qualitativa das normas adotadas pelas instituições de memória, para os registos de autoridade, bibliográfico e formatos de representação. Após a concetualização, foi desenvolvido e avaliado o protótipo, essencialmente, pela análise qualitativa dos dados obtidos a partir de testes à recuperação da informação. A experiência decorreu num ambiente laboratorial onde foram realizados testes, entrevistas e inquéritos por questionário. A análise cruzada dos resultados, obtida pela triangulação dos dados recolhidos através das várias fontes, permitiu concluir que tanto os utilizadores como os profissionais da informação consideraram muito interessante a integração da harmonização normativa refletida nos vários módulos, a integração de serviços/ferramentas comunicacionais e a utilização da componente participativa/colaborativa da plataforma privilegiando a Wiki, seguida dos Comentários, Tags, Forum de discussão e E-mail.The growth of digital information (born digital and digitalized), as a result of the technological advances of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), raised the need for a reflection on the information models adopted by the memory institutions such as Libraries, Archives and Museums (LAM), and their ability to answer the information needs of their users. This research work aims at designing and evaluating a generic model for the organization and representation of electronic information in an information system. This model is intended for users’ and information professionals’ use, taking advantage of the current collaborative and participatory environment context. The conceptualization of the model design was based on the qualitative analysis results of the authority records, bibliographic records and representation formats standards adopted by memory institutions. After design harmonization, a prototype was developed to test the ideas and concepts underlying the model. The data was collected through retrieval information tests, performed at the prototype, by users and information professionals (in a total of thirty participants). The experience took place in a laboratory context. The data collection was carried out through the application of different data gathering techniques, such as tests, interviews and questionnaire surveys. The triangulation of cross-analysis results achieved from various sources showed that both users and information professionals found the integration of standard harmonization reflected in the various modules very interesting, as well as the integration of services / communication tools and the use of a participatory component / collaborative platform focusing on the Wiki, followed by Comments, Tags, Discussion forums and E-mail

Crowdsourcing for image metadata : a comparison between game-generated tags and professional descriptors

One way to address the challenge of creating metadata for digitized image collections is to rely on user-created index terms, typically by harvesting tags from the collaborative information services known as folksonomies or by allowing the users to tag directly in the catalog. An alternative method, only recently applied in cultural heritage institutions, is Human Computation Games, a crowdsourcing tool that relies on user-agreement to create valid tags. This study contributes to the research by investigating tags (at various degrees of validation) generated by a Human Computation Game and comparing them to descriptors assigned to the same images by professional indexers. The analysis is done by classifying tags and descriptors by term-category, as well as by measuring overlap on both syntactic (matching on terms) and semantic (matching on meaning) level between the tags and the descriptors. The findings shows that validated tags tend to describe ‘artifacts/objects’ and that game-generated tags typically will represent what is in the picture, rather than what it is about. Descriptors also primarily belonged to this term-category but also had a substantial amount of ‘Proper nouns’, mainly named locations. Tags generated by the game, not validated by player-agreement, had a higher frequency of ‘subjective/narrative’ tags, but also more errors. It was determined that the exact (character-for-character) overlap i.e. the number of common terms compared to the entire pool of tags and descriptors was slightly less than 5% for all types of tags. By extending the analysis to include fuzzy (word-stem) matching, the overlap more than doubled. The semantic overlap was established with thesaurus relations between a sample of tags and descriptors and adapting this - more inclusive - view of overlap resulted in an increase in percentage of tags that were matched to descriptors. More than half of the validated tags had some thesaurus relation to a descriptor added by a professional indexer. Approximately 60% of the thesaurus relations between descriptors and valid tags were either ‘same’ or ‘equivalent’ and roughly 20% were associative and 20% were hierarchical. For the hierarchical relations it was found that tags typically describe images at a less specific level than descriptors.Joint Master Degree in Digital Library Learning (DILL

Connected Information Management

Society is currently inundated with more information than ever, making efficient management a necessity. Alas, most of current information management suffers from several levels of disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated islands, small notes don’t fit into traditional application categories, navigating the data is different for each kind of data; data is either available at a certain computer or only online, but rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach to information management that avoids these ways of disconnectedness. The core idea of CoIM is to keep all information in a central repository, with generic means for organization such as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by offering specialized editors. The central repository eliminates the islands of application-specific data and is formally grounded by a CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF repository. The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based editing of this data, similar to database applications such as MS access. Further kinds of data are supported by extending RDF, as follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain structured text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported by the CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly captured and annotated with meta-data. Generic means for organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data. Ubiquitous availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the web application HYENA/Web and the desktop application HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be synchronized between these applications. The applications were used to validate the CoIM ideas