The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems
The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems
The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems
Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Marking content with descriptive terms, also called keywords or tags, is a common way of organizing content for future navigation, filtering, or search. Though organizing electronic content this way is not new, a collaborative form of this process, which has been given the name tagging by its proponents, is gaining popularity on the web.
Marking content with descriptive terms, also called keywords or tags, is a common way of organizing content for future navigation, filtering, or search. Though organizing electronic content this way is not new, a collaborative form of this process, which has been given the name tagging by its proponents, is gaining popularity on the web.
Document repositories or digital libraries often allow documents in their collections to be organized by assigned keywords. However, traditionally such categorizing or indexing is either performed by an authority, such as a librarian, or else derived from the material provided by the authors of the documents (Rowley 1995). In contrast, collaborative tagging is the practice of allowing anyone especially consumers to attach keywords or tags to content. Collaborative tagging is most useful when there is nobody in the librarian role or there is simply too much content for a single authority to classify; both of these traits are true of the web, where collaborative tagging has grown popular.
A number of now-prominent web sites feature collaborative tagging. Typically, such sites allow users to publicly tag and share content, so that they cannot only categorize link information for themselves, they can browse the information categorized by others.
There are therefore at once both personal and public aspects to collaborative tagging systems. In some sites, collaborative tagging is also known as folksonomy, short for folk taxonomy; Del.icio.us, allows for the collaborative tagging of shared website bookmarks. Yahoo's My Web does this as well, and Cite Like and Connotea do the same for references to academic publications. Some services allow users to tag, but only content they own, for example, Flickr for photographs and Technorati for weblog posts.
We can analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, through the study of the collaborative tagging system Delicious, we can discover regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used and burst of popularity in bookmarking, as well as a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given URL. We can define a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge. Tagging is fundamentally about sense making. Sense making is a process in which information is categorized and labeled and, critically, through which meaning emerges (Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld forthcoming). The nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users can be analyzed.
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.
Recall that basic levels are related to the way in which humans interact with the items at those levels (Tanaka & Taylor 1991); when one interacts with the outside world, one makes sense of the things one encounters by categorizing them and ascribing meaning to them.
Sense making is also influenced by social factors (Weick et al. forthcoming). Because many experiences are shared with others and may be nearly universal within a culture or community, similar ways of organizing and sense making do result; after all, societies are able to collectively organize knowledge and coordinate action.
Del.icio.us, or Delicious, is a collaborative tagging system for web bookmarks that its creator, Joshua Schechter, calls a social bookmarks manager. As might be expected, users vary greatly in the frequency and nature of their Delicious use.
Users' tag lists grow over time, as they discover new interests and add new tags to categorize and describe them. Tags may exhibit very different growth rates, however, reflecting how use interests develop and change over time.
Tagging, as discussed above, is an act of organizing through labeling, a way of making sense of many discrete, varied items according to their meaning. By looking at those tags, we can examine what kinds of distinctions are important to taggers. We can 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 can 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 can 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.
There is some discussion among the Delicious tagging community concerning whether a tag is properly considered to be descriptive of the object/thing itself, or descriptive of a category into which the thing/object falls (Coates 2005). However, we see no contradiction between these two kinds of tag. When a category is defined as circumscribing many objects with a particular property, we naturally consider each of those objects to have that property. In our estimation, the scope of the tag whether it describes an object or a group of objects is less interesting than the function of a tag, or what kind of information it conveys and how it is used. Here, we identify several functions tags perform for bookmarks.
1. Identifying what (or who) it is about. Overwhelmingly, tags identify the topics of bookmarked items. These items include common nouns of many levels of specificity, as well as many proper nouns, in the case of content discussing people or organizations.
2. Identifying what it is. Tags can identify what kind of thing a bookmarked item is, in addition to what it is. For example, article, blog and book.
3. Identifying Who Owns It. Some bookmarks are tagged according to who owns or created the bookmarked content. Given the apparent popularity of weblogs among Delicious users, identifying content ownership can be particularly important.
4. Refining Categories. Some tags do not seem to stand-alone and, rather than establish categories themselves, refine or qualify existing categories. Numbers, especially round numbers (e.g. 25, 100), can perform this function.
5. Identifying Qualities or Characteristics. Adjectives such as scary, funny, stupid, inspirational tag bookmarks according to the tagger's opinion of the content.
6. Self-Reference. Tags beginning with my, like my-stuff and my-comments identify content in terms of its relation to the tagger.
7. Task Organizing. When collecting information related to performing a task, that information might be tagged according to that task, in order to group that information together. Examples include toread, job search. Grouping Task-related information can be an important part of organizing while performing a task. (Jones et al. 2005).
While many URLs (e.g. Figure 6a) do indeed reach their peak of popularity as soon as they reach Delicious, many other URLs (e.g. Figure 6b) have relatively few bookmarks for a long time until they are rediscovered and then experience rapid jump in popularity. A burst in popularity may be self-sustaining, as popular URLs are displayed on the popular page, which users can visit to learn what others are currently popular. However, the initial cause of a popularity burst is likely exogenous to Delicious; given that Delicious is a bookmarking service, a mention on a widely read weblog or website is a plausible primary cause.
As a URL receives more and more bookmarks, the set of tags used in those bookmarks, as well as the frequency of each tag's use within that set, represents the combined description of that URL by many users.
One might expect that individuals' varying tag collections and personal preferences, compounded by an ever-increasing number of users, would yield a chaotic pattern of tags. However, it turns out that the combined tags of many users' bookmarks give rise to a stable pattern in which the proportions of each tag are nearly.
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