Collaborative Tagging

Agenda
• Introduction
• Taxonomy
• Folksonomy
• Tagging in Folksonomy
• Visualizing Folksonomy
• Folksonomy and Semantic Web
• Metadata and Semantic Web
• Folksonomy Advantages
• Folksonomy Disadvantages
• Conclusion
 Taxonomy
• One of the most common strategies for organizing content
• Only admin / authorized person can add / edit categorize the
content
• Use of taxonomy is not possible in websites with user generated
content
• Content is constantly changing and its not possible to have a
standalone taxonomy
• No single party can enforce taxonomy in whole user community
– Example, Wordpress blog categories.
– To overcome the disadvantages in Taxonomy, Folksonomy
introduced.
 Folksonomy
Folksonomy became popular in 2004
Folksonomy is a characteristic of web 2.0
Folksonomy = Collective Tagging = Tagging = Social Tagging =
Social Indexing = Collaborative Tagging

Folksonomy

Online => Delicious Offline => Library Records

Folksonomy => Folk + Taxonomy


Folks => Done by people

Taxonomy => Classification of item into groups
 Tagging in Folksonomy
TAG
• Tag is simply a freely chosen set of textual keywords.
• Tags not created but specialists and created by users
• Tag can be categorized with any word that defines a
relationship between the online resource and a concept in the
user's mind
• Any number of words might be chosen, some of which are
obvious representations, others making less sense outside the
tag author's context.

Ta
s
er

gs
Us

Resources
 Visualizing Folksonomy
• Tag cloud – Way to visualize
tag in a Folksonomy.
• Tag clouds represents by
size, number of times the tag
applied to single item and
quality of content.
• Tag clouds are interactive
• Tags are hyperlinks thus
allows users to drill down on
the data.
• Delicious is the first
bookmarking site to
introduce tagging concept.
 Folksonomy and Semantic Web
• Folksonomy intended to make a body of information
increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over
time
• Folksonomy hold a key in developing semantic web and
information retrieval system.
• Web content searchable through machine readable meta
datas. Not sure every web authors have added metadata in
their pages.
• Time consuming to learn and use

How SE Categorize content in WEB

<meta name="keywords" content="computing, computer
software, computer">
<meta name="description" content="Cheap widgets for sale">
<meta name="author" content=“Mercy Livingstone">
 Metadata and Semantic Web

Examples of Metadata for Book

Title

Author

Date of Publication

Subject

Unique Indentifier (International Standard Book
Number)

Number of pages

Language of text
 Metadata and Semantic Web
Example of Metadata for Audio
– Album Name
– Song title
– Year
– Composer
– Contributing Author
– Track Number
– Album Artist
People also use “Dublin Core” metadata which consists of
standard 15 metadata.
 Folksonomy Advantages
• To provide additional keywords to help search engines and tag
services add up your keyword counts and classify your post
content.
• To provide additional navigation on your site, like an index
reference, helping the user find related post content.
• Cheap, easy way to classify web content
• Capable to adapt to user style
• Scalability – easy for everyone use
• Reflects user's vocabulary
• Help machine to retrieve best information in the web.(If done
with accuracy)
 Folksonomy Disadvantages
• Polisemy - Same tag with different meaning
• Ex, Chicken, Windows
• Synonyms – Different tags with same meaning
• Ex, Mate,Friend; Ocean, Sea
• Plural Vs Singular
• Acronym and Abbreviations
• No spaces allowed (only single word)
• Language Barrier
• Organized by amateur
• Anti-spam measure is tough
 Conclusion
• Web is infinite, can’t rely on experts to classify things
• Its upto end users to contribute
• Single tag is not going to speak the language. The number of
increase in tag that matters. Ex. Flickr
• Some extend taxonomy also can’t be ruled out. Ex. Library
Catalogue.
• We have to capitalize on the benefits of both the systems.
• University of Pennsylvania adopted Penn Tagg
• Beyond the partnership with Taxonomy, Folksonomy moves
forward in future classifying web towards creating semantic
web.