ActiveTags: Making Tags More Useful Anywhere on the Web

Hagemann, S. and Vossen, G.

Tags in social tagging systems store meaning for the taggers who have entered them, and other users often share this understanding. The result of this, a folksonomy, is typically used in several ways, including information retrieval and clustering, serendipitous information access, or visualization of folksonomic characteristics. For these uses tags work pretty well; however, the ambiguity of tags makes it difficult to use them for more than searching and browsing. This paper introduces examples of current programmatic support in the form of mashups and highlights its shortcomings. It identifies several types of tags based on their structure and language, and discusses how these types support programmatic uses. The main part is the presentation of the ActiveTags system, a browser extension with supporting server infrastructure. Using it the same community process that creates a folksonomy can be used to enhance tags with programmatic meaning. Users are enabled to create reliable mashups based on tags. Effectively, this leads to customized views of Web pages with tagged content. ActiveTags naturally increases the usability of social tagging systems and further extends the notion of user-generated content.

Cite as: Hagemann, S. and Vossen, G. (2009). ActiveTags: Making Tags More Useful Anywhere on the Web. In Proc. Twentieth Australasian Database Conference (ADC 2009), Wellington, New Zealand. CRPIT, 92. Bouguettaya, A. and Lin, X., Eds. ACS. 41-48.

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