The impact of resource title on tags in collaborative tagging systems

This web site is an extension of work presented in The impact of resource title on tags in collaborative tagging systems. The paper can be found in the proceedings of Hypertext '10 conference

Abstract: Collaborative tagging systems are popular tools for organization, sharing and retrieval of web resources. Their success is due to the freedom and simplicity of use. To post a resource the user should only define a set of tags that would position the resource in the system's data structure -- folksonomy. This data structure can serve as a rich source of information about relations between tags and concepts they represent. To make use of information collaboratively added to folksonomies we need to understand how users make tagging decisions. Three factors that are believed to influence user tagging decisions are the tags used by other users, the organization of the personal repository and the knowledge model shared between users. In our work we examine the role of another potential factor -- resource title. Despite all advantages of tags, tagging is a tedious process. To minimize the effort users are likely to tag with keywords that are easily available. We show that resource title is an easy to access and comprehend source of useful tags. Given a choice of two tags with the same meaning users are likely to be influenced by their presence in the title. However, a factor that seems to have stronger impact on users' tagging decisions is maintaining the consistency of the personal profile of tags. The results of our study reveal a new, less idealistic picture of collaborative tagging systems in which the collaborative aspect seems to be less important than personal gains and convenience.

Additional resources:
Paper
Conference presentation (TBD)
Example experiment
Source code
Full results
Datasets created during the study
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Created: 2010.04.07
Last update: 2010.06.11