A comparative study of Flickr tags and index terms in a general image collection

Abstract

Web 2.0 and social/collaborative tagging have altered the traditional roles of indexer and user. Traditional indexing tools and systems assume the top-down approach to indexing in which a trained professional is responsible for assigning index terms to information sources with a potential user in mind. However, in today's Web, end users create, organize, index, and search for images and other information sources through social tagging and other collaborative activities. One of the impediments to user-centered indexing had been the cost of soliciting user-generated index terms or tags. Social tagging of images such as those on Flickr, an online photo management and sharing application, presents an opportunity that can be seized by designers of indexing tools and systems to bridge the semantic gap between indexer terms and user vocabularies. Empirical research on the differences and similarities between user-generated tags and index terms based on controlled vocabularies has the potential to inform future design of image indexing tools and systems.Toward this end, a random sample of Flickr images and the tags assigned to them were content analyzed and compared with another sample of index terms from a general image collection using established frameworks for image attributes and contents. The results show that there is a fundamental difference between the types of tags and types of index terms used. In light of this, implications for research into and design of user-centered image indexing tools and systems are discussed.

Conceptualising the geographic world: the dimensions of negotiation in crowdsourced cartography

“…These 'folksonomies' (i.e., taxonomies defined by ordinary people) tend to be more flexible, scalable, decentralised, and easier to maintain than more formal classification schemas and ontologies, but su↵er from semantic incoherence, idiosyncratic usage of tags, as well as polysemy and synonymy, limiting the tags' informational value. (Rorissa 2010). All of these aspects converge in OSM, described in the next section.…”

“…Contributors often disagree on the conceptual granularity, which is the level of detail to be included in the conceptualisation. To understand this aspect, a useful distinction can be drawn from cognitive psychology applied to folk taxonomies, following Rorissa (2010). According to a seminal categorisation theory by Rosch (1999), abstract concepts belong to the superordinate level (e.g., furniture), while concrete concepts are located at the basic level (e.g., chair).…”

Searchable Signatures: Context and the Struggle for Recognition

“…For example, in a comparison of Flickr tags and index terms from the University of St. Andrews Library Photographic Archive, Rorissa stresses the importance of exploring similarities and differences between indexers' and users' language, noting that "social tagging could serve as a platform on which to build future indexing systems." 26 Like others, Rorissa hopes that continued research into user-generated social tags will be able to "bridge the semantic gap between indexerassigned terms and users' search language." 27 In fact, some are currently utilizing social tags in an effort to describe and facilitate access to collections.…”

Topical Video Search: Analysing Video Concept Annotation through Crowdsourcing Games

“…Heymann et al investigated a large-scale sample of forty million bookmarks from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and found that in 20% of the cases user tags do not occur in the page text, backlink page text, or forward link page text of the pages they annotate. Studies in (Bischoff et al, 2004a;Halvey et al, 2007;Rorissa, 2010;Yanbe et al, 2007) investigate this phenomenon across multiple domains and multimedia resource types and identify the gaps between the tag space and the querying vocabulary. The common conclusion is that user tags can improve search by bridging the vocabulary gap.…”