Folksonomies and Social Tagging

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Folksonomies and Social Tagging
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What are folksonomies?

• Folksonomies (known also as social
  classifications) are user created metadata.
• They are grassroots community classification of
  digital assets.
• The term folksonomy was created by Thomas
  Vander Val and represents a merging of the terms
  folk and taxonomy.

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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 users collection and (b) across the
  entire system, e.g., the page http//del.icio.us/t
  ag/blogging will show all bookmarks that are
  tagged with blogging by any user.

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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

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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.

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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)

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How folksonomies work

• Registration is free. Little personal information
  is required normally just a login name and
  password.
• Once registered, you add a bookmarklet to your
  browser. When you find a web page you'd like to
  add to your list, you add it to our manager site.
  You then assign keywords to describe the content
  of the site.
• If your page has been bookmarked by other people,
  you will be shown the most popular tags assigned
  to it you can assign your own tags, or simply
  click on the popular tags to have them assigned
  automatically.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Social Bookmarking as aClassification 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.

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Function of Social Bookmarking

• Method for organize and storing information
• Social bookmarking as a type of sense making
• Allows users to organize personal information
  their way
• Connects users to other related topics and ideas
• Gives the users the ability "to sort the wheat
  from the chaff
• More narrowed focus, vetted by humans as opposed
  to computers
• Collective Wisdom - tags are ranked by
  popularity.
• Connects users to other users
• Allows users to interact with other users methods
• Eavesdropping on someone elses thought
  pattern

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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
• Tag cloud - a visual weighted list of a set or
  subset of tags

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Example of a Tag Cloud
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Tagging Issues

• Tagging is Good
• dynamic distributed classification
• related tag networks
• tag cloud shows extent of collection
• user terminology
• diversity

• Tagging is Bad
• mob indexing
• no controlled vocabulary
• poor browsing experience
• no thesaurus
• consensus by a mob or no consensus

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Tagging Issues

• spelling variations
• spelling mistakes
• potentially mistaken term usage
• acronyms, homonyms, synonyms
• sesquipedalians (terms made by sticking many
  smaller terms together e.g. information_seeking_be
  haviour)?
• non subject tags (e.g. affective tags, time and
  task tags)?

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Patterns in Tagging (3 studies of tags)

• Are categories emerging in social tagging that
  will complement those developed through
  professional methods?
• What does tag convergence and co-word usage
  suggest about the utility of tagging?
• What implications do the use of affective or time
  and task related tags have for the organisation
  of information?

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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

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Tag Frequency 1
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Tag Frequency 2
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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.

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Tag Lists

• Shirky 2005 (http//del.icio.us/url/97c30ea798555e
  7b8380bc1f4925233d)
• by nayma to folksonomy tags web2.0 ontology
• by zeft to ontology
• by chrysoberyl to 2.0 libraries thinky
• by peleke12 to ontology shirky tagging
• by alisaepstein to folksonomy folksonomies
  tagging web2.0 653

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Co-word Graph of Tags
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Comparison of Tags with Controlled Vocabulary

• 1. study tag use and types of tags on articles
  compared to subject headings on CiteULike (like
  del.icio.us but indexes journal articles which
  have more metadata)?
• most common relationship between the terms was
  "related but not in the thesaurus"
• next most common RT and then equivalence
• 2. study comparing tags and LCSH on LibraryThing
  without further context it is extremely difficult
  to tell whether an apparently anomalous tag in a
  tag cloud is a mistake

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Non Subject Tags

• some time and task or affective tags are very
  popular
• cool, fun, funny, toread appeared in main
  del.icio.us tag cloud
• ToRead and fun are popular tags on all three
  sites
• affective terms appear more frequent on Citeulike
  and Connotea than expected
• biology articles more often listed as toread
  math and physics as fun

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Utility of Tagging

• tagging can be useful for providing a good
  picture of how users see the material
• Steve Museum project found that users used very
  different terminology and tagged specific items
  seen in the picture which had been absent from
  professional cataloguing

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Tagging Discussion

• tagging has all the problems of free text
  search/automatic indexing
• but, tag groups tend to converge on a useful set
  of terms after a threshold number of users
• users use some terminology which is rare or
  completely absent from subject heading lists
  (e.g. time and task tags)?
• user terms often not part of formal thesaurus

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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

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Folksonomies and user vocabulary

• In information retrieval systems (IRS), the
  vocabulary used to organize content may be based
  upon the choices of the authors of the materials,
  the designer of the IRS, or the designer of the
  controlled vocabulary in place.
• Folksonomies reflect users choices in diction,
  terminology, and precision.
• Folksonomies can adapt very quickly to changes in
  user needs and vocabulary, and adding new terms
  to a folksonomy incurs virtually no cost for
  either the user or the system.

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Folksonomies and online communities

• Folksonomies create a sense of community amongst
  their users. Most social bookmark managers will
  recommend new links and other members folders or
  sites that are strongly related to an individual
  member by analyzing his or her linking pattern.
• As soon as users assign a tag to an item, they
  can see the cluster of items carrying the same
  tag. This feedback loop leads to a form of
  asymmetrical communication between users through
  metadata.
• The users of a system negotiate the meaning of
  the terms in the folksonomy.

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Ambiguity

• The terms in a folksonomy may have inherent
  ambiguity as different users apply terms to
  documents in different ways.
• E.g., the tag ANT has been used to refer to
  Actor Network Theory, a sociological term, as
  well as Apache Ant, a Java programming tool

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Polysemy

• The polysemous tag port could refer to a sweet
  fortified wine, a porthole, a place for loading
  and unloading ships, the left-hand side of a ship
  or aircraft, or a channel endpoint in a
  communications system.

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Synonyms

• Folksonomies provide for no synonym control the
  terms mac, macintosh, and apple, for
  example, are used to describe Apple Macintosh
  computers.
• Both singular and plural forms of terms appear
  (e.g., flower and flowers), thus creating a
  number of redundant headings.

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Specificity

• Related terms that describe an item vary along a
  continuum of specificity ranging from very
  general to very specific so, for example,
  documents tagged perl and javascript may be
  too specific for some users, while a document
  tagged programming may be too general for
  others.

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Syntax

• Folksonomies provide no guidelines for the use of
  compound headings, punctuation, word order, and
  so forth for example, should one use the tag
  vegan cooking or cooking, vegan?

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Incorrect Usage

• Tags could be applied incorrectly the term
  archeology, for example, is used to tag items
  pertaining to both dinosaurs and primitive
  microbes

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Consensus

• Users strive to achieve a degree of consensus
  over the general meaning of tags.
• As a URL receives more and more bookmarks, the
  set of tags used in those bookmarks becomes
  stable across different users.
• This stabilization is facilitated through
  imitation and shared knowledge. Del.icio.us shows
  users the tags most commonly used by others who
  bookmarked the same URL already users can easily
  select those tags for use in their own bookmarks,
  thus imitating the choices of previous users.

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Folksonomies and controlled vocabularies

• Folksonomies are not necessarily antithetical to
  controlled vocabularies.
• Once you have a preliminary system in place, you
  can use the most common tags to develop a
  controlled vocabulary that truly speaks the
  users language
• E.g., you can link related tags such as nyc,
  newyork, and newyorkcity it may be possible
  to align these terms with established controlled
  vocabularies, such as the Getty Thesaurus of
  Geographic Names, in order to provide a greater
  range of related terms.

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Other uses for folksonomies

• Could be used to organize resources for an
  intranet, course collection, etc.
• Could be used to enhance the customizable
  features of library catalogues. Clients could
  organize and tag items of interest from the
  catalogue, as well as external sources (if
  allowable).
• Could share these tags and sources with other
  clients with similar interests. This could lead
  to a user-directed reader advisory service.
• Could use folksonomies to supplement existing
  LCSH vocabulary in the catalogue, e.g., LCSH does
  not contain terms for the popular film genres
  cult, drama, or action.

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Advantages of Social Bookmarking

• Low cognitive cost large grassroots community
  users vs. expert metadata specialists or
  catalogers
• Self moderating and democratic
• Flexible, inclusive, adaptive and current
• Immediate Feedback
• Usability easy to use
• Great at serendipitous discovery

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Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking

• Low Precision/Recall due to synonymous and
  polysemous tags
• Basic Level problem Granularity of tags (too
  specific, too general)
• Lack of hierarchy no parent-child, broad-narrow
  relationship
• Highly susceptible to malicious users.
• Meta Noise - incorrectly "malicious" tags
• Gaming - cheating the system
• Spamming - a universal plague of all social
  systems
• Fails as a search system, bad at finding specific
  items

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Conclusions

• Folksonomies are undoubtedly fraught with the
  problems typical of uncontrolled vocabularies,
  but their growing popularity suggests that people
  are interested and motivated in assigning their
  own metatags to items of interest.
• One cannot help but wonder whether such
  enthusiasm for metadata would be the same if
  people were asked to use only prescribed and
  standardized vocabularies.

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Other Areas to Explore

• The cognitive and behavioural aspects of
  folksonomy use
• What is the tagging behaviour of people who use
  folksonomies?
• Why do people choose the tags they use what
  motivates them to modify these tags how often do
  they modify them?
• How are folksonomies used communally?
• How do folksonomies foster consensus in the use
  of tags?
• How does the community affect which tags are used
  and how?

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Folksonomies in Libraries

• Libraries cant continue to rely exclusively on
  in-house cataloging
• We can achieve our overall goals while allowing
  new mechanisms along the way
• Users are one additional source of metadata we
  must tap
• We must match appropriate metadata needs to the
  tasks users are best equipped to perform
• Good interfaces for metadata collection will be
  key
• We must use the best ideas for user
  participation, and adapt them for the library
  environment