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The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging

Published: 08 May 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classifications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site delicio. us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for "popular" sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
May 2007
1382 pages
ISBN:9781595936547
DOI:10.1145/1242572
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 08 May 2007

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Author Tags

  1. collaborative filtering
  2. complex systems
  3. delicious
  4. emergent semantics
  5. power laws
  6. tagging

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WWW'07
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WWW'07: 16th International World Wide Web Conference
May 8 - 12, 2007
Alberta, Banff, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2023)Improving Collaborative Filtering Recommendations with Tag and Time Integration in Virtual Online CommunitiesApplied Sciences10.3390/app13181052813:18(10528)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Social Tagging and Secondary School LibrariesHandbook of Research on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Librarianship10.4018/978-1-7998-9094-2.ch014(201-231)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)BlockList: A Game to Teach Basic Linked Lists Operations To Novice ProgrammersProceedings of the 15th Annual ACM India Compute Conference10.1145/3561833.3561844(35-40)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2022
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  • (2021)An Improved Methodology for Collaborative Construction of Reusable, Localized, and Shareable OntologyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30544129(17463-17484)Online publication date: 2021
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