Inproceedings,
Tracking Usage in Collaborative Tagging Communities
Workshop on Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAMA'07), (June 2007)masses may not only support folksonomies but may also hinder their usage for individuals, efficiency of tagging systems decreases with growing population,.
Abstract
Collaborative tagging has recently attracted the attention of both
industry and academia due to the popularity of content-sharing
systems such as CiteULike, del.icio.us, and Flickr. These systems
give users the opportunity to add data items and to attach their
own metadata (i.e., tags) to stored data. The result is an effective
content management tool for individual users. Recent studies,
however, suggest that, as tagging communities grow, the added
content and the metadata become harder to manage due to
increased content diversity. Thus, mechanisms that cope with
increase of diversity are fundamental to improve the scalability
and usability of collaborative tagging systems.
This paper analyzes whether usage patterns can be harnessed to
improve navigability in a growing knowledge space. To this end,
it presents a characterization of two collaborative tagging
communities that target the management of scientific literature:
CiteULike and Bibsonomy. We explore three main directions:
First, we analyze the tagging activity distribution across the user
population. Second, we define new metrics for similarity in user
interest and use these metrics to uncover the structure of the
tagging communities we study. The properties of the structure we
uncover suggest a clear segmentation of interests into a large
number of individuals with unique preferences and a core set of
users with interspersed interests. Finally, we offer preliminary
results that suggest that the interest-based structure of the tagging
community can be used to facilitate content retrieval and
navigation as communities scale.
