Folksonomy and Tagging in the Social Web

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Folksonomy and Tagging in the Social Web

Dr. Harry Chen

CMSC 491S/691S

February 18, 2008

Agenda

How did folksonomy and tagging emerge in the Social Web?

You tag – why and how? Can we define an information model for it?

How do we characterize tagging systems?How do we visualize tags?

Tags Everywhere

It’s almost a de facto standard for Web 2.0 sites to support tagging.

Tags are on fire!

Traditional media sites show signs of support for tags…

Tags and Tagging

We need to distinguish between Web sites that use tags for navigation and Web sites that support tagging.

Sites provide tag-driven navigation may not support tagging.

Think: CNN vs. Flickr

Why Use Tags

Tags (keywords) seem to be effective in helping people to find and discover information.

The Web is a collection of unstructured links and resources. Using tags can give people a sense of organization in a chaotic information environment.

Can better search algorithms replace the need for tags?

Tags are Old School

The use of tags is nothing new if you talk to any librarians or people who study information organization.

Melvil Dewey

http://www.redhill.dudley.gov.uk/LearningCentre/old_site/LearningCentre/deweysystem.htm

The Dewey Decimal System (DDS)

DDS in Action

http://www.db.dk/bh/lifeboat_ko/SPECIFIC%20SYSTEMS/dewey_decimal_classification.htm

How do you think these categories are created?

Definition: Taxonomy

DDS is a taxonomy in the library world. Taxonomy also appears in the Web world.

Categories are defined by an authority Categories are specially designed (i.e., not arbitrarily) to

organize information in a specific way.

Taxonomy on the Web

It’s easy to spot taxonomy on the Web

Keywords defined by their editors to encourage the readers to stay on their Web sites.

Criticisms Against Taxonomy

The use of taxonomy is not always practical for Web sites that provide user-generated content. “Content is constantly changing. It’s impractical to

have one static taxonomy.” “No single party should have the authority to enforce

any taxonomy on the whole user community.” “A taxonomy that is good for categorizing information

is not necessarily effective for finding and discovering information on the Web”

Do you think it’s a good idea to organize your Web site using DDS?

Folksonomy Emerges

Folksonomy appears in Web sites that supports user tagging.

Folksonomy a.k.a. collective tagging, social classification, social indexing, tagging.

Definition: Folksonomy

Folksonomy is a practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Users are usually free to choose the keywords

that they use in tagging Systems usually provide “tag clouds” for finding

and discovering information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

IMHO

The emergence of folksonomy also has something to do with Web search.

Search engines employ automatic techniques to organize information.

Folksonomy relies on manual labor to category information.

The folksonomy approach compliments what’s provided by the search and index algorithms.

How do we tag?

Traditional subject indexingSubject indexing with feedbackTagging from a cognitive perspective

Traditional Subject Indexing

Goal: construct a representation of a resource that is being tagged.

A resource maybe a book, an article or a Web link.

Conceptual analysis

Translation

Source: Tagging, Folksonomy & Co – Renaissance of Manual Indexing. Jakob Vob, Submitted to the 10th International Symposium for Information Science, Cologne.

Conceptual Analysis

Decide on what a resource is about and what is relevant in particular. “Is this book about

politics or economy?” “Is this article related

to science or religion?”

Conceptual analysis

Translation

Translation

A process of finding an appropriate set of index terms that represent the substance of conceptual analysis. Remember our DDS

example?

Conceptual analysis

Translation

About Traditional Subject Indexing

The indexer (person who does the tagging) is usually a subject expert with special training.

Tags used usually come from a set of controlled vocabulary (i.e., pre-defined, fixed, rigid and authoritarian).

No mention of how the pool of control vocabulary will evolve when the content of resources change

Subject Indexing with feedback

A system can choose to implement “feedback” to allow the indexers to influence the pool of controlled vocabulary.

Note: feedback doesn’t eliminate the existing of controlled vocabulary or authority.

Conceptual analysis

Translation Feedback

Wikipedia: Subject Indexing with Feedback

Wikipedia editors may assign at least 1 category to a page.

Editors can reuse the exist category.

Editors can suggest new category “feedback”.

Interesting human behavior in Wikipedia’s Feedback system

Everyone is allowed to change and add categories

Most editors only edit article textMost editors don’t add tags (i.e.

categories). If they do, most editors choose to reuse the existing categories.

Not many editors change or add categories.


Any thoughts on why people may have behaved this way?

A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging

How cognitive psychology and anthropology play a role in tagging.

Why is interesting? By understanding how we tag can help

developers to create more effective computer systems to assist users in tagging and finding tagged information.

Adopted from “A cognitive analysis of tagging” by Rashmi Sinha.http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html

A Two-Stage Process

Asking you to tag is asking you to categorize.

Categorization is a 2-stage process Stage 1: Related Category Activation Stage 2: The Decision

Stage 1: Relate Category Activation

Concepts come to you mind: “news”, “video”, “breaking news”, “Atlanta”, “GA”, “cable”, “TV” etc.

About to tag: “http://cnn.com”

Stage 2: The Decision

How do I choose what concepts to use?

“news”, “video”, “breaking news”, “Atlanta”, “GA”, “cable”, “TV” etc.

Decision making is hard!

You have to choose what tags to use. How do you decide? What criteria do you use to

measure the quality of a tag? “breaking news” vs. “news” “TV” vs. “Cable”

Part of your task: optimize its future findability. Will you find http://cnn.com via “news” or “tv” Do you have too many bookmarks tagged “tv”? Should you create a separate category for “cable” for a

special group of “tv” bookmarks? Is your tag schema balanced?

Analysis Paralysis

The hardest part of categorizing a resource is to decide what tags to use.

Other questions will slow you down

If it’s costly to rename a tag, you will likely to think twice about picking “news” over “breaking news” or vice versa.

If you are tagging for sharing information with others, you will consider if your tag “TV” is findable by others via “tv” or “cable” – maybe no one uses “tv”.

Web 2.0 Tagging Comes to Help

Tagging in Web 2.0 in fact is far easy than we think.

We don’t need to worry much about the “Analysis Paralysis” problem. Just write down all possible tags that come to

our mind. If we got it wrong, we can count on Web 2.0 UI

to rename and re-tag.

Exercise

If you are a Web 2.0 entrepreneur and VC gives you the money to build a next-generation tagging system.

What feature or capability would you implement and why?

Tagging Systems

A typical tagging system

User

Resources Tags

What kind of relationships exist between users and tags?

What kind of relationships exist between resources and tags?

What kind of relationships exist between user and resources?

A Typology of Tagging Systems

AutomaticTagging

ResourceConnectivity

VocabularyConnectivity

VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources

ResourceRepresentation

Tagging System


Tagging Rights

Who is allowed to tag? Can any user tag any

resources? Any restrictions based on

resources, tags or users? Who controls the

restrictions? IS there a distinction

between tags by different types of users and resources?

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Source of Resources

Do users contribute resources?

Do users tag resources already in the system?

Who decide which resources are tagged?

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Resource Representation

What kind of resource is tagged?

How resources are presented to the user when they are being tagged? Tagging photos maybe

different from tagging bookmarks

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Automatic Tagging

Is tagging enriched with automatically created tags?

Does the system provide automatic tagging without any user interventions? Gnizr RSS Robot

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Resource Connectivity

How are resources connected to each other? Via links Grouped in hierarchy

How are connection between created? In flickr and del.icio.us,

how you find related resources?

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Vocabulary Connectivity

Are tags connected with relations?

What kind of relationships is it? Typed? Taxonomy? Thesaurus?

Can user define tag relations?

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Vocabulary Control

Is there a control on tags to be used and tags not to be used?

Are tags created while tagging?

Is the management of the vocabulary a separate task?

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Tagging Aggregation

Can a tag be assigned only once to a resource? A set model

Can the same tag be assigned multiple times? A bag model

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Tagging Feedback

How does the interface support tag entry?

Do users see other tags assigned to the resources by other users or other resources tagged with the same tag?

Does the system suggest tags?

Does the system rejects tags?

AutomaticTagging



VocabularyControl

TaggingAggregation

TaggingFeedback

Tagging Rights

Source of Resources


Tagging System


Tag Visualization

Here are some examples. What’s your opinion?

Are they effective? What purpose do they serve? Does it change the way we design Web pages?

Yahoo! Tagline

http://www.research.yahoo.com/taglines/

Tag Cloud as Home Page

http://83degrees.com

Elastic Tag Maps

http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/tag_maps_v5/

Tag Cloud for a Quick Summary

http://tinyurl.com/yu5l2r

Summary

Folksonomy and tagging emerged because we need to organize unstructured information on the Web – especially those user-generated content.

Tagging is a natural extension of the traditional subject indexing.

By understanding the cognitive process of tagging we as developers can develop better tagging systems to help users to organize and find information.

Homework for this week!

Post 1 blog on any of the following subject: Folksonomy and tagging Tag visualization Psychology and cognitive process behind

tagging Tagging and the Semantic Web Tagging in the enterprises

Your encouraged to post 1+

Next Class: Oxford 2.0 style debate

Goal: Help us to better understand the controversial issues that surround the Social Web technologies. Learn to be a better thinker.

We will adopt a simplified version of the debate.

Read about the Oxford Style Debate

Prior to the day of the debate

A resolution will be defined – you suggest or I pick.

Class will be divided into two groups: Proposition: supports the resolution Opposition: oppose the resolution

Decide days before the debate who will be in which group.

You do research and find arguments and evidences to support your group.

On the day of the debate

Take polls on the number of students who support or oppose the resolution

Follow by a 20-minutes group discussion I will moderate the debate Each group will take turns to present their arguments.

During each turn, the group has max. 10 minutes to present their arguments.

The debate ends 10 minutes before the class ends. Take polls again and see if anyone has switched sides.

There is a catch!

After the debate

If the second poll reveals a change in the number of students either support or oppose the resolution,

the team represented the side with the largest poll number increase will be immune from the following week’s blogging assignment.

Now. Decide the next debate groups

Resolution for Feb. 20, 2008

The social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has made us worse off as a society.

Research ideas: Is MySpace Good for Society? (NYTimes) The Impact of Social Networking on Society (Slashdot) Think from different perspectives: e.g., an economic,

psychological, sociological, technological or political perspective

Folksonomy and Tagging in the Social Web

Technology

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