Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in today's web and have attracted the interest of our research community in a variety of investigations. This has led to several assumptions about tagging, such as that tagging systems exhibit a social component. In this work we overcome the previous absence of data for testing such an assumption. We thoroughly study social interaction, leveraging for the first time live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system BibSonomy. Our results indicate that sharing of resources constitutes an important and indeed social aspect of tagging.
This paper reviews research into social tagging and
folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published
through December 2007). Methods of researching the
contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described,
and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a
new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and
relevant research methods are only now being defined. This
paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy,
tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches
are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the
role of user tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on
tagging (and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the
nature of social tagging systems (as socio-technical frameworks).
Tagging, folksonomy, distributed classification, ethnoclassification—however it is labelled, the concept of users creating and aggregating their own metadata is gaining ground on the internet. This literature review briefly defines the topic at hand, looking at current implementations and summarizing key advantages and disadvantages of distributed classification systems with reference to prominent folksonomy commentators. After considering whether distributed classification can replace expert catalogers entirely, it concludes that distributed classification can make an important contribution to digital information organisation, but that it may need to be integrated with more traditional organisation tools to overcome its current weaknesses.