Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems: An Examination of Tagging Practices

Abstract

This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by multi-dimensional scaling, the authors discovered that tagging practices to some extent work in ways that are continuous with conventional indexing. Small numbers of tags tend to emerge by unspoken consensus, and inconsistencies follow several predictable patterns that can easily be anticipated. However, the tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to time and task which suggest the presence of an extra dimension in classification and organization, a dimension which conventional systems are unable to facilitate.

Perspectives on social tagging

“…Citation analysis and co-citation analysis are two bibliometric methods that can be applied to social tagging (Kipp & Campbell, 2006): Bibliometric measures used to investigate author co-citation relationships, co-word occurrence, and co-journal citations can be extended to the analysis of relationships among taggers, tags, and objects. Other methods commonly employed in bibliometric analysis can also be deployed to investigate tagging behavior, including clustering, multidimensional scaling, and factor analysis (see Table 2).…”

Better to organize personal information by folders or by tags?: The devil is in the details

“…More recent studies compare the use of folders across document, email, and web bookmark organizations (Boardman & Sasse, 2004;Jones et al, 2005;Bergman et al, 2006). Other studies have explored the use of tags, particularly in web-based situations where people can benefit from the tagging efforts of others (Golder & Huberman, 2006;Kipp & Campbell, 2006;Ames & Naaman, 2007). However, Pak et al (2007) …”

Effective Use of Ontologies

“…Les etiquetes d'aquesta folksonomy (Angeletou et al 2007) estan sovint força relacionades entre si, ja que poden ser utilitzades per un usuari per etiquetar recursos relacionats, o per diferents usuaris per etiquetar el mateix recurs (Wu, Zhang, and Yu 2006;Campbell 2006). Els patrons que sorgeixen d'aquestes pràctiques d'etiquetatge proporcionen, no només una manera d'organitzar la informació per als usuaris (Kipp and Campbell 2006), sinó també una capa de semàntica feble (Dye 2006) …”