Position Paper, Tagging, Taxonomy, Flickr, Article, ToRead
Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006, (May 2006)Abstract
In recent years, tagging systems have become increasingly
popular. These systems enable users to add keywords (i.e., “tags”)
to Internet resources (e.g., web pages, images, videos) without
relying on a controlled vocabulary. Tagging systems have the
potential to improve search, spam detection, reputation systems,
and personal organization while introducing new modalities of
social communication and opportunities for data mining. This
potential is largely due to the social structure that underlies many
of the current systems.
Despite the rapid expansion of applications that support tagging of
resources, tagging systems are still not well studied or understood.
In this paper, we provide a short description of the academic
related work to date. We offer a model of tagging systems,
specifically in the context of web-based systems, to help us
illustrate the possible benefits of these tools. Since many such
systems already exist, we provide a taxonomy of tagging systems
to help inform their analysis and design, and thus enable
researchers to frame and compare evidence for the sustainability
of such systems. We also provide a simple taxonomy of incentives
and contribution models to inform potential evaluative
frameworks. While this work does not present comprehensive
empirical results, we present a preliminary study of the photosharing
and tagging system Flickr to demonstrate our model and
explore some of the issues in one sample system. This analysis
helps us outline and motivate possible future directions of
research in tagging systems.
