The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging

@inproceedings{citeulike:1326856, abstract = {The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classifications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site delicio. us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for "popular" sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Halpin, Harry and Robu, Valentin and Shepherd, Hana }, booktitle = {WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web}, citeulike-article-id = {1326856}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1242572.1242602}, isbn = {9781595936547}, keywords = {collaboration, complexity, tagging}, pages = {211--220}, posted-at = {2007-10-30 05:33:28}, priority = {3}, publisher = {ACM Press}, title = {The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1242572.1242602}, year = {2007} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:1326856 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1326856 TI - The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging T2 - WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web SP - 211 EP - 220 AD - New York, NY, USA PB - ACM Press SN - 9781595936547 N2 - The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classifications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site delicio. us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for "popular" sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags KW - collaboration KW - complexity KW - tagging AU - Halpin, Harry AU - Robu, Valentin AU - Shepherd, Hana PY - 2007/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1242572.1242602 ER -