This document discusses folksonomies and social tagging. It defines tags as keywords or terms assigned to information to enable classification and search. Tagging systems allow users to tag resources with tags. A folksonomy is a collaboratively generated tagging system where users freely choose labels, creating an emergent taxonomy. Social bookmarking uses tagging to organize and share web bookmarks.

1. Folksonomies and Social
Tagging

2. What Are Tags?
• Keywords or terms associated with or
assigned to a piece of information
• They enable keyword-based classification
and search of information

3. Basic Model for Tagging Systems
USER
RESOURCES
TAGS

8. Don’t confuse tags with keywords
or full-text searching
• Keywords are behind the scenes, tags are often
visibly aggregated for use and browsing
• Keywords can not be hyper-linked
• Keywords imply searching, tags imply linking
• Full-text searching is passive, tagging is active
• It’s more about connecting items rather than
categorizing them.

9. Tags can be …
• Descriptions of the subject matter
• Where the item is located
• The intended use of the item
• Individual (gift from mom)
• Different people have different tagging
patterns
• Tagging systems encourage differences

10. Tags are
• Non-hierarchical
• A way to create links between items by the
creation of sets of objects
• A means of connecting with others
interested in the same things

11. Tagging Systems Define
• Who can tag
• What can be tagged
• What kinds of tags can be used
• Tagging systems may result in the
creation of a “folksonomy”

12. Types of Tagging Systems
• Managing personal information
• Social bookmarking
• Collecting and sharing digital objects
• Improving the e-commerce experience

13. Why is tagging so popular?
• It is easy and enjoyable
• It has a low cognitive cost
• It is quick to do
• It provides self and social feedback
immediately

14. Putting the social in tagging
• Tags allow for social interaction because
when we navigate by tags we are directly
connecting with others
• People tag for their own benefit

15. Tags, and therefore social tags are
• Dynamic categorization systems
• Often created on-the-fly
• Chosen as relevant to the user – not to the
creator, cataloger or researcher
• A social activity (more on this later)
• Hopefully one small step toward a more
interactive and responsive library system

20. Social Bookmarking
Common elemental characteristics of social
bookmarking (folksonomic) systems.
• Tag – a single word label that is applied to an
object (URL)
• Tagging – the process of organizing an object
by assigning a label or “tag”
• Tag bundle –a group of tags linked by another
tag or “super tag”
• Tag cloud - a visual weighted list of a set or
subset of tags

21. Tag Cloud
A visual weighted list of a set or subset of tags

22. Example of a Tag Cloud

28. What is a folksonomy?
• Folksonomy is a collaboratively generated,
open-ended labeling system that enables users
to categorize content by freely chosen labels.
• Thomas Vander Wal coined the phrase by
combining “folk” + “taxonomy”. 􀂄􀂄
• Folksonomy refers to an “emergent, grassroots
taxonomy”
– An aggregate collections of tags
– A bottom-up categorical structure development
– An emergent thesaurus

34. Why do folksonomies work?
• The searcher defines the access, but
• The aggregation of the terms has public
value
• It’s a typically messy democratic approach

41. What makes folksonomies
popular?
• Their dynamic nature works well with
dynamic resources
• They’re personal
• They lower barriers to cooperation

50. Tagging and the consequent
folksonomies work best when
• It’s easy to do
• It’s not commercial in nature
• Taggers have ownership
• Taggers are more likely to tag their own
stuff than they are your stuff
• It has been shown to work well on the
Web

51. The unexpected development:
terminological consensus
• Collective action yields common terms
• Stabilization may be caused by imitation
and shared knowledge
• The wisdom of the crowd

52. Is your tagging influenced
by my tagging?
• Of course it is!
• People are beginning tag in ways that
make it easier for others to find like stuff
• Shared meaning consequently evolves for
tags
• Most used tags become most visible

53. Strengths of folksonomies
• Cost-effective way to organize Internet
• Social benefits
• It’s inclusive
• For many environments, they work well

54. Collocation issues
• They do not yield the level of clarity that
controlled vocabularies do
• Term ambiguity – words with multiple
meanings
• No synonym control

55. Issues with specificity
• Variable specificity for related terms
• Broadness of terms impacts precision –
terms are often imprecise
• Mixed perspectives

56. Issues with structure
• Singular and plural forms create
redundant headings
• No guidelines for the use of compound
headings, punctuation, word order
• No scope notes
• No cross references

57. Issues with accuracy
• Collective ‘wisdom’ of the tagging
community
• How does wrong information impact
retrieval
• Conflicting cultural norms
• Sometimes authority counts

58. “Spagging” and other problems
• Opening doors to opinion tags
• Tagging wars
• “Spagging”  Spam tagging

59. Tidying up the tags…?
• Lists of tagging norms have been
developed
• Are there programmatic solutions?
• Users know they are looking at tags
• By tidying, do we destroy the essence of
why this works?
• Do we realistically have the resources?

60. Where are folksonomies found?
• Folksonomies are found in social bookmarks
managers such as Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) and
Furl (http://www.furl.net/), which allow users to:
– Add bookmarks of sites they like to their personal
collections of links
– Organize and categorize these sites by adding their own
terms, or tags
– Share this collection with other people with the same
interests.
• The tags are used to collocate bookmarks: (a) within
a user’s collection; and (b) across the entire system,
e.g., the page http://del.icio.us/tag/blogging will
show all bookmarks that are tagged with “blogging”
by any user.

61. Social Bookmarking
and Social Tagging
• what is social bookmarking?
– public sharing of links
• association of tags (keywords) with links
– network of related links created by users
• network of related tags created by users
• what is tagging?
– act of associating a term with a link or article
– labelling or classifying for personal use
• Tagging creates an association between user,
item and set of tags

62. Inter-term relationships
• There are no clearly defined relations
between and among the terms in the
vocabulary, unlike formal taxonomies and
classification schemes, where there are
multiple kinds of explicit relationships (e.g.,
broader, narrower, and related terms)
between and among terms.
• Folksonomies are simply the set of terms
that a group of users tagged content with;
they are not a predetermined set of
classification terms or labels.

63. Popular folksonomy sites
• Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us)
• Flickr (http://www.flickr.com)
• Frassle (http://www.frassle.org)
• Furl (http://www.furl.net)
• Simpy (http://www.simpy.com)
• Spurl (http://www.spurl.com)
• Technorati (http://www.technorati.com)

68. Blogs (Technorati: http://technorati.com/ )
Bookmarks (Delicious: http://del.icio.us/ )
Books (Librarything: http://www.librarything.com/,
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/)
Emails (Gmail: http://mail.google.com/ )
Events (http://www.goingtomeet.com/ )
People (Tagalag: http://www.tagalag.com/ )
Pictures (Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/ )
Podcasts (Odeo: http://odeo.com/ ))

71. Delicious site

77. http://technorati.com/

84. http://www.librarything.com/

95. The popularity of folksonomies
• The growing popularity of folksonomies can
be attributed to two principal factors:
– An increasing need to exert control over the mass
of digital information that we accumulate on a
daily basis.
– A desire to “democratize” the way in which digital
information is described and organized by using
categories and terminology that reflect the views
and needs of the actual end-users, rather than
those of an external organization or body.

96. What is Social Bookmarking?
• Social bookmarking is a server side web
based service which allows users to
create, manage and share their personal
bookmarks in a social community.
• Social bookmarking systems have three
major axes: users, tags, and URLs.
• Social bookmarking systems are a type of
folksonomy.

97. …then what is folksonomy?
• Folksonomy is a collaboratively generated,
open-ended labeling system that enables users
to categorize content by freely chosen labels.
• Thomas Vander Wal coined the phrase by
combining “folk” + “taxonomy”. 􀂄􀂄
• While folksonomy appears to be the most
popular, other names for the same phenomena
have been proposed which included: folk
classification, folk taxonomy, ethnoclassification,
distributed classification, social classification,
open tagging, free tagging, faceted hierarchy,
etc

98. Social Bookmarking as a
Classification System
• A classification system is a structured scheme
for categorizing knowledge, entities or objects to
improve access or study, created according to
alphabetical, associative, hierarchical,
numerical, ideological, spatial, chronological, or
other criteria.
• Traditional methods for organizing information
include controlled vocabularies, taxonomies,
thesauri, and ontologies.

99. Convergence and Divergence
in Tags
• When enough people tag a site, a set of
more frequently applied tags will emerge
that start to look like a reasonable
description of the item
• tag trends do not follow standard power
laws for term usage (80/20 rule)
– the drop off tends to be much slower at first
before suddenly returning to the normal power
law

100. Tagging Patterns
• Consensus forms after a certain number of
users have tagged an item
– first item by 2250 people, second only tagged by 49
• frequency graphs suggest a relative consensus
on terms, but tag lists and co-word graphs do
not
– high frequency tags used frequently but not
necessarily with other high frequency terms
– tagging patterns may show group consensus and
trends in user communities.

101. Social Bookmarking Characteristics
• Common elemental characteristics of social
bookmarking (folksonomic) systems.
– Tag – a single word label that is applied to an object
(URL)
– Tagging – the process of organizing an object by
assigning a label or “tag”
– Tag bundle –a group of tags linked by another tag or
“super tag”. Bundles are a way to group together
common tags. For instance, if you have the tags
"design", "painting", and "moma", you may want to
group these together into a bundle called "art".
– Tag cloud - a visual weighted list of a set or subset of
tags