Study: Social Tagging in Communities

Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks

Emma Tonkin, Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Margaret E. I. Kipp, Andrea Resmini, Heather D. Pfeiffer and Qiping Zhang gather a series of international perspectives on the practice of social tagging of documents within a community context.

Ariadne, Issue 54 January 2008

From the introduction:

"Social tagging, which is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, and social indexing, allows ordinary users to assign keywords, or tags, to items. Typically these items are Web-based resources and the tags become immediately available for others to see and use. Unlike traditional classification, social tagging keywords are typically freely chosen instead of using a controlled vocabulary. Social tagging is of interest to researchers because it is possible that with a sufficiently large number of tags, useful folksonomies will emerge that can either augment or even replace traditional ontologies. As a result, social tagging has created a renewed level of interest in manual indexing [1]. In order for researchers to understand the benefits and limitations of using user-generated tags for indexing and retrieval purposes, it is important to investigate to what extent community influences tagging behaviour, characteristic effects on tag datasets, and whether this influence helps or hinders search and retrieval.

This article reports on research presented on a panel at The American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) 2007 annual conference which investigated the use of social tagging in communities and in context. The panel was co-sponsored by SIG-TAG, a special interest group of ASIS&T that is interested in the study of social tagging, the Special Interest Group on Knowledge Management (SIG-KM), and the Special Interest Group on Classification Research (SIG-CR)."

...

"Several models of tagging behaviour, aimed at describing the ways in which people tag, are invoked in these studies along with metrics such as the number of tags given, tag co-occurrence and measured frequency. This reflects an ongoing dialogue between researchers; some apply methods from social network analysis, some from the many subfields of linguistics, knowledge management and classification research. Tagging practice is generally from a known stance, such as metadata, keyword or thesaurus provision, a matter of situating the relevance of the concept to known disciplines. Here too, we begin with a familiar theme; writ large, this panel examines certain facets of contextuality in information retrieval."