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The f olksonom y tag cloud: when is it useful?

The f olksonom y tag cloud: when is it useful?. James Sinclair and Michael Cardew-Hall Department of Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Journal of Information Science (JIS), 2007. Outline. Introduction Experimental Method Results Conclusion. Introduction.

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The f olksonom y tag cloud: when is it useful?

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  1. The folksonomytag cloud: when is it useful? James Sinclair and Michael Cardew-Hall Department of Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Journal of Information Science (JIS), 2007

  2. Outline • Introduction • Experimental Method • Results • Conclusion

  3. Introduction • Tagging Services • Tagging in the enterprise • Tag Clouds

  4. Tagging Services • Tagging services allow participants to associate freely determined keywords (called ‘tags’) with a particular resource. • There is little incentive for authors to put time and effort into providing quality metadata unless it is for the purposes of self-promotion. Thus, author generated metadata is perceived as inaccurate at best, and deliberately misleading at worst. [Thomas and Griffin, 1999]

  5. Tagging in the enterprise • The sharing of key resources and the generation of emergent vocabulary helps decrease the cognitive distance between people working in the organization.

  6. Tag Clouds • User interface element commonly associated with folksonomy datasets. • Tomas Vader Wal --- the man credited with coining the term ‘folksonomy’ --- described tag clouds as being ‘cute but offering little value’ • Do tag clouds provide value to people seeking information from a folksonomy dataset?

  7. Experimental Method • Participant: provided with 2 options to perform information-seeking task • Tag cloud • Search box • Tag around 10 articles each • 2 session: tag and query • Hypothesis: if people found no value in a tag cloud for information seeking, then they would primarily use the search box to seek information

  8. Participant Demography

  9. Tagging Interface: Session One

  10. Tag Size • Tag cloud displayed top 70 most-used tags • Folksonomy frequency tends to follow a power law distribution

  11. Question List

  12. Search Interface: Session Two

  13. Tag Cloud Query

  14. Exit Survey

  15. Dataset Characteristics • Number of participants relatively small • Participant not select articles to tag • No feedback aspect to tagging. Participant not able to browse other’s tags

  16. Result • Assume last query made before answering a question providing the relevant information to answer • Tag cloud does provide some kind of value

  17. Participants who relied on the tag cloud made more queries when answering a question, even when a relevant keyword was present in the tag cloud

  18. Conclusion • Particularly useful for browsing or non-specific information discovery • Tag cloud providing a visual summary of the contents of the database • Scanning tag cloud requiring less cognitive load than formulating specific query terms

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