The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging

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The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging

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International World Wide Web Conference archive
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web table of contents

Banff, Alberta, Canada

SESSION: E-communities table of contents

Pages: 211 - 220

Year of Publication: 2007

ISBN:978-1-59593-654-7

Authors

Harry Halpin	University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Valentin Robu	CWI: National Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Hana Shepherd	Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Sponsor

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 46, Downloads (12 Months): 382, Citation Count: 35

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abstract references cited by index terms collaborative colleagues

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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.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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