Why do Users Tag? Detecting Users’ Motivation for Tagging in Social Tagging Systems

Abstract

While recent progress has been achieved in understanding the structure and dynamics of social tagging systems, we know little about the underlying user motivations for tagging, and how they influence resulting folksonomies and tags. This paper addresses three issues related to this question: 1.) What motivates users to tag resources, and in what ways is user motivation amenable to quantitative analysis? 2.) Does users' motivation for tagging vary within and across social tagging systems, and if so how? and 3.) How does variability in user motivation influence resulting tags and folksonomies? In this paper, we present measures to detect whether a tagger is primarily motivated by categorizing or describing resources, and apply the measures to datasets from 8 different tagging systems. Our results show that a) users' motivation for tagging varies not only across, but also within tagging systems, and that b) tag agreement among users who are motivated by categorizing resources is significantly lower than among users who are motivated by describing resources. Our findings are relevant for (i) the development of tag recommenders, (ii) the analysis of tag semantics and (iii) the design of search algorithms for social tagging systems.

Patterns in Interactive Tagging Networks

“…They both proposed different methods to model the user interests. The motivation of users for social tagging has been investigated in a line of research (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009;Strohmaier, Körner, and Kern 2010;Körner et al 2010a;. It has been shown that the tagging motivation differs not only across the social tagging systems, but also within the tagging systems.…”

Multidimensional Journal Evaluation: Analyzing Scientific Periodicals beyond the Impact Factor

“…While all the tags occurring on a platform are called a 'folksonomy", the totality of all the tags assigned to one particular document is called a 'docsonomy' (Vander Wal, 2005;Peters, 2009;. Tags can help both the user who picked them to organize his documents and other users to find new content (Mathes, 2004;Peters, 2009;Strohmaier, Körner, & Kern, 2010). The anatomy of a tag application is based on a tripartite graph of the user-tag-resource triple (Farooq et al, 2007;Cattuto, Benz, Hotho, & Stumme, 2008;Peters, 2009).…”