Folksonomies and Social Tagging

1. Folksonomies and Social Tagging

2. What Are Tags? • Keywords or terms associated with or assigned to a piece of information • They enable keyword-based classification and search of information

3. Basic Model for Tagging Systems USER RESOURCES TAGS

8. Don’t confuse tags with keywords or full-text searching • Keywords are behind the scenes, tags are often visibly aggregated for use and browsing • Keywords can not be hyper-linked • Keywords imply searching, tags imply linking • Full-text searching is passive, tagging is active • It’s more about connecting items rather than categorizing them.

9. Tags can be … • Descriptions of the subject matter • Where the item is located • The intended use of the item • Individual (gift from mom) • Different people have different tagging patterns • Tagging systems encourage differences

10. Tags are • Non-hierarchical • A way to create links between items by the creation of sets of objects • A means of connecting with others interested in the same things

11. Tagging Systems Define • Who can tag • What can be tagged • What kinds of tags can be used • Tagging systems may result in the creation of a “folksonomy”

12. Types of Tagging Systems • Managing personal information • Social bookmarking • Collecting and sharing digital objects • Improving the e-commerce experience

13. Why is tagging so popular? • It is easy and enjoyable • It has a low cognitive cost • It is quick to do • It provides self and social feedback immediately

14. Putting the social in tagging • Tags allow for social interaction because when we navigate by tags we are directly connecting with others • People tag for their own benefit

15. Tags, and therefore social tags are • Dynamic categorization systems • Often created on-the-fly • Chosen as relevant to the user – not to the creator, cataloger or researcher • A social activity (more on this later) • Hopefully one small step toward a more interactive and responsive library system

16. What is a folksonomy? • Folksonomy refers to an “emergent, grassroots taxonomy” • An aggregate collections of tags • A bottom-up categorical structure development • An emergent thesaurus • A term coined by Thomas Vander Wal

17. Why do folksonomies work? • The searcher defines the access, but • The aggregation of the terms has public value • It’s a typically messy democratic approach

18. What makes folksonomies popular? • Their dynamic nature works well with dynamic resources • They’re personal • They lower barriers to cooperation

19. Tagging and the consequent folksonomies work best when • It’s easy to do • It’s not commercial in nature • Taggers have ownership • Taggers are more likely to tag their own stuff than they are your stuff • It has been shown to work well on the Web

20. The unexpected development: terminological consensus • Collective action yields common terms • Stabilization may be caused by imitation and shared knowledge • The wisdom of the crowd

21. Is your tagging influenced by my tagging? • Of course it is! • People are beginning tag in ways that make it easier for others to find like stuff • Shared meaning consequently evolves for tags • Most used tags become most visible

22. Strengths of folksonomies • Cost-effective way to organize Internet • Social benefits • It’s inclusive • For many environments, they work well

23. Collocation issues • They do not yield the level of clarity that controlled vocabularies do • Term ambiguity – words with multiple meanings • No synonym control

24. Issues with specificity • Variable specificity for related terms • Broadness of terms impacts precision – terms are often imprecise • Mixed perspectives

25. Issues with structure • Singular and plural forms create redundant headings • No guidelines for the use of compound headings, punctuation, word order • No scope notes • No cross references

26. Issues with accuracy • Collective ‘wisdom’ of the tagging community • How does wrong information impact retrieval • Conflicting cultural norms • Sometimes authority counts

27. “Spagging” and other problems • Opening doors to opinion tags • Tagging wars • “Spagging”  Spam tagging

28. Tidying up the tags…? • Lists of tagging norms have been developed • Are there programmatic solutions? • Users know they are looking at tags • By tidying, do we destroy the essence of why this works? • Do we realistically have the resources?

29. Recommendations Don’t assume that one size fits all • Retain controlled vocabularies in the catalog • Explore ways to use controlled vocabularies to help organize the internet by re-purposing controlled vocabularies that already exist • Invite Folksonomies to the party in the catalog to gain their benefits • Explore ways to combine the two systems

30. Recommendations When you invite folksonomies into the catalog, do so strategically, and carefully • Don’t put terms in the same index as controlled vocabularies • Find ways to associate terms applied across editions of works • Need for mediation, or at least observation • The crowd is not necessarily the best arbiter of specific terminology

31. Recommendations Always remember why people tag • People tag things because they want to find them, not because they want others to find them • Be aware that this will impact the quality of the terms, and their frequency

32. Recommendations Controlled vocabularies could be better utilized than they currently are • Subject structures are underutilized in the ILS • Controlled vocabularies that exist are not being exported to the Web • Well-connected terms foster discovery – let’s connect them. Index those cross references where available

33. Where are folksonomies found? • Folksonomies are found in social bookmarks managers such as Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) and Furl (http://www.furl.net/), which allow users to: • Add bookmarks of sites they like to their personal collections of links • Organize and categorize these sites by adding their own terms, or tags • Share this collection with other people with the same interests. • The tags are used to collocate bookmarks: (a) within a user’s collection; and (b) across the entire system, e.g., the page http://del.icio.us/tag/blogging will show all bookmarks that are tagged with “blogging” by any user.

34. Social Bookmarking and Social Tagging • what is social bookmarking? • public sharing of links • association of tags (keywords) with links • network of related links created by users • network of related tags created by users • what is tagging? • act of associating a term with a link or article • labelling or classifying for personal use • Tagging creates an association between user, item and set of tags

35. Inter-term relationships • There are no clearly defined relations between and among the terms in the vocabulary, unlike formal taxonomies and classification schemes, where there are multiple kinds of explicit relationships (e.g., broader, narrower, and related terms) between and among terms. • Folksonomies are simply the set of terms that a group of users tagged content with; they are not a predetermined set of classification terms or labels.

36. Popular folksonomy sites • Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) • Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) • Frassle (http://www.frassle.org) • Furl (http://www.furl.net) • Simpy (http://www.simpy.com) • Spurl (http://www.spurl.com) • Technorati (http://www.technorati.com)

37. The popularity of folksonomies • The growing popularity of folksonomies can be attributed to two principal factors: • An increasing need to exert control over the mass of digital information that we accumulate on a daily basis. • A desire to “democratize” the way in which digital information is described and organized by using categories and terminology that reflect the views and needs of the actual end-users, rather than those of an external organization or body.

38. What is Social Bookmarking? • Social bookmarking is a server side web based service which allows users to create, manage and share their personal bookmarks in a social community. • Social bookmarking systems have three major axes: users, tags, and URLs. • Social bookmarking systems are a type of folksonomy.

39. …then what is folksonomy? • Folksonomy is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables users to categorize content by freely chosen labels. • Thomas Vander Wal coined the phrase by combining “folk” + “taxonomy”. 􀂄􀂄 • While folksonomy appears to be the most popular, other names for the same phenomena have been proposed which included: folk classification, folk taxonomy, ethnoclassification, distributed classification, social classification, open tagging, free tagging, faceted hierarchy, etc

40. Social Bookmarking as aClassification System • A classification system is a structured scheme for categorizing knowledge, entities or objects to improve access or study, created according to alphabetical, associative, hierarchical, numerical, ideological, spatial, chronological, or other criteria. • Traditional methods for organizing information include controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies.

41. Function of Social Bookmarking • Method for organize and storing information • Social bookmarking as a type of sense making • Allows users to organize personal information their way • Connects users to other related topics and ideas • Gives the users the ability "to sort the wheat from the chaff“ • More narrowed focus, vetted by humans as opposed to computers • Collective Wisdom - tags are ranked by popularity. • Connects users to other users • Allows users to interact with other users methods • “Eavesdropping on someone else’s thought pattern”

42. Social Bookmarking Characteristics Common elemental characteristics of social bookmarking (folksonomic) systems. • Tag – a single word label that is applied to an object (URL) • Tagging – the process of organizing an object by assigning a label or “tag” • Tag bundle –a group of tags linked by another tag or “super tag” • Tag cloud - a visual weighted list of a set or subset of tags

43. Example of a Tag Cloud

44. Tagging is Good dynamic distributed classification related tag networks tag cloud shows extent of collection user terminology diversity Tagging is Bad mob indexing no controlled vocabulary poor browsing experience no thesaurus consensus by a mob or no consensus Tagging Issues

45. Tagging Issues • spelling variations • spelling mistakes • potentially mistaken term usage • acronyms, homonyms, synonyms • sesquipedalians (terms made by sticking many smaller terms together e.g. information_seeking_behaviour)‏ • non subject tags (e.g. affective tags, time and task tags)‏

46. Patterns in Tagging (3 studies of tags) • Are categories emerging in social tagging that will complement those developed through professional methods? • What does tag convergence and co-word usage suggest about the utility of tagging? • What implications do the use of affective or time and task related tags have for the organisation of information?

47. Convergence and Divergence in Tags • When enough people tag a site, a set of more frequently applied tags will emerge that start to look like a reasonable description of the item • tag trends do not follow standard power laws for term usage (80/20 rule)‏ • the drop off tends to be much slower at first before suddenly returning to the normal power law

48. Tag Frequency 1

49. Tag Frequency 2

50. Tagging Patterns • Consensus forms after a certain number of users have tagged an item • first item by 2250 people, second only tagged by 49 • frequency graphs suggest a relative consensus on terms, but tag lists and co-word graphs do not • high frequency tags used frequently but not necessarily with other high frequency terms • tagging patterns may show group consensus and trends in user communities.