Structures in Collaborative Tagging: An Empirical Analysis

Marvasti, A. F. and Skillicorn, D.

It is widely believed that users choose meaningful tags; that the combinations of these tags from multiple users helps to elicit meaning for tagged objects; and that implicit communities can be discovered among the users who use a particular tag or tag a particular object. We examine data on tagging practices from the Delicious web site (delicious.com) and find that there is little support for any of these beliefs. Although users individually do seem to have a small set of tags that they use in a controlled and effective way, they also use very large sets of other tags in a much more haphazard way. These poorly managed tags obscure much of the collective sense making and implicit community structure. We derive some suggestions for improving collaborative tagging systems.

Cite as: Marvasti, A. F. and Skillicorn, D. (2010). Structures in Collaborative Tagging: An Empirical Analysis. In Proc. 33rd Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC 2010) Brisbane, Australia. CRPIT, 102. Mans, B. and Reynolds, M. Eds., ACS. 109-116

(from crpit.com) (local if available)