Tag! Are You It? Taxonomies & Folksonomies in Practice Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President, May 28, 2008.
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Transcript of Tag! Are You It? Taxonomies & Folksonomies in Practice Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President, May 28, 2008.
Tag! Are You It? Taxonomies & Folksonomies in Practice
Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President, May 28, 2008
Overview
• About Alexander Street Press• Is there value in social tagging?• What lies behind the value• Some practical examples• The future
Alexander Street Press
Performing Arts, Drama, and Film
World Literature
Women’s History
Religion
CounselingMusic
Social and Cultural History
Sociology
Black Studies
American Civil War
“All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource.”
Wikipedia, entry on social bookmarking, May 24th, 2008
The masses speak…
“All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource.”
Wikipedia, entry on social bookmarking, May 24th, 2008
The masses speak…
• Not all tag based classifications are done by humans – machine based tagging is large and growing• Many humans don’t understand or agree on ‘the content of the resource’• Who’s to say what the content actually is?• Who’s to say what a resource is?• Social tagging requires computers to leverage collective human input using algorithms amongst other tools.
Actually it’s not the machine vs. the human – it’s the machine and the human
Is there value in social tagging?
>3,000 photos of Alexandria, VA
Performance
Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?, Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector Garcia-MolinaDept. of Computer Science, Stanford University
Folksonomy
Cirrus on delicious
Item # 22 describes cirrus (the cloud)7 people tagged it.
Citeulike
Folksonomy TaxonomyEvolving terms Good Poor
New terms Fast Slow
Accuracy 80%? 95%?
Structure Low High
Hierarchy Behavior generated
(Popularity)
Editor generated(Accuracy)
Search Precision Variable Consistent
Customization High Low
Search Exhaustiveness Low High
Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy
Popularity
Effectiveness
Folksonomies
Taxonomies
Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy
49.7 m users (E-Bay)2.7 Bn searches per month (Google)
# of users * frequency of use * quality of use- (100 * bad use) ?Effectiveness
Subject understanding * MLS training ?Effectiveness
Looking closer…
Internet Trust ‘anti pattern’
Low
High
Medium
Effectiveness
1. System started by trusted parties
2. Benefits from being non-hierarchical, easy participation, quality participants
3. Unwashed masses start using it
4. Systemalmost breaks
5. Controls put in place
AfterThe Journal of the Future, Geoffrey Bilder, SSP, 2005
Time
Social Tagging
• Personalization• Speed• Discovery• Reach• Versatility
• No standard keywords• No standard structure/hierarchy• Unorthodox and personal tags
• Multiple Meanings• Mis-tagging due to spelling
• Synonym/antonym confusion• Advertising• Spamming
The Good The BadThe Mixed
ActiveUser assigns termsUser selects termsUser comments
Human and machine interactions
Passive• Most commented, blogged
e-mailed, viewed, cited…• Terms culled from associated
articles, comments…• Measuring link traffic, use,
search terms matched to results.
• Data mining, authority inference,
Google’s Page rank, etc…Delici.ous, flickr
Much social tagging is a by-product of other processes
• Central place to store your bookmarks (Delicious)• Place to share your photographs (Flickr)• Place to meet friends (My Space)• Store your bibliography (Zotero, Citeulike)• Have fun (Google Image Labeller)• Give students classwork (Alexander Street Press)
Leveraging existing processes…
Activity vs. Passivity
Active PassiveMixed
DeliciousASP Submission tools
Google Search
ZoteroCiteulike
ASP Playlists
Issues – user tagging
Tags
Philadelphia? Shirts? Women’s Rights? President?
Issues – granularity
Different views of the same item
CAB – (Husbandry)
Agricola (Agriculture)
OSH-ROM(Occupational Health and Safety)
Biosis (Species)
Long term factors influencing combustion and burn rates in North American forests. David Jones, Journal of Forest Husbandry, Sept 1999.
Humans are good at…
What works…
•Playlists on ASP’s music and video products – >20,000 users
•Over 120,000 playlists created so far
• 1,000 created by ASP
• 42,000 user created
• 80,000+ derivative playlists
Example – Dance in Video
Playlists
Playlists
Playlists
Summary
Social Tagging evolution
Descriptive Power
Suggestions, mapping
Social Network
Importance/Trust Currency
Popularity
Larger networks
Trackback, RSS Feeds
• A lot to offer• It works best
• In (very) large networks• When it is a byproduct or alongside another process
• It will always ends up being (partially) controlled • Network effects aren’t open to most of us• Discipline focus is the best way to add value
The future of social tagging…
Man empowered by machine
www.alexanderstreet.com