Folksonomies

Classifying Tags using Open Content Resources

by Simon Overell

Published at WSDM 2009

Tagging has emerged as a popular means to annotate on-line objects such as bookmarks, photos and videos. Tags vary in... more Tagging has emerged as a popular means to annotate on-line objects such as bookmarks, photos and videos. Tags vary in semantic meaning and can describe different aspects of a media object. Tags describe the content of the media as well as locations, dates, people and other associated meta-data. Being able to automatically classify tags into semantic categories allows us to understand better the way users annotate media objects and to build tools for viewing and browsing the media objects. In this paper we present a generic method for classifying tags using third party open content resources, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory. Our method uses structural patterns that can be extracted from resource meta-data. We describe the implementation of our method on Wikipedia using WordNet categories as our classification schema and ground truth. Two structural patterns found in Wikipedia are used for training and classification: categories and templates. We apply our system to classifying Flickr tags. Compared to a WordNet baseline our method increases the coverage of the Flickr vocabulary by 115%. We can classify many important entities that are not covered by WordNet, such as, London Eye, Big Island, Ronaldinho, geocaching and wii.

Information architecture: Facetag: Integrating bottom‐up and top‐down classification in a social tagging system

by Andrea Resmini

User Issues in a Bottom-up+ Top-down Tagging Application

by Andrea Resmini

Will social classification replace traditional forms of organising information on the web?

by Izabella Warner

This paper looks at the evolving concept of social classification on the web and, contrasts it with traditional... more This paper looks at the evolving concept of social classification on the web and, contrasts it with traditional techniques of organising information. It analyses the rise of this concept, its advantages, and the challenges posed by individual users creating information collections. It illustrates that social classification provides a useful tool through which the growing number of information resources on the web can be given personal meaning. However, the current short -comings of the system give it a complementary role to traditional forms of information classification. It is proposed that before social classification can take a stronger foothold on Information Architecture, and organisations begin to structure content differently for their clients, social classification needs to evolve further along its current emerging trends of: greater structure, auto-manual components, leveraging community effects and incorporating user-generated innovation. Following this transformation social classification will change the way digital information is presented, and shared understanding is created and communicated on the web.

A Semantic and Collaborative Platform for Agile Requirements Evolution

by Nirav Ajmeri

The characteristics of web-based and community-oriented social software are very useful in the context of software... more The characteristics of web-based and community-oriented social software are very useful in the context of software engineering in general and requirements engineering in particular. Their ease of use, transparency of communication, user orientation, self organization and emergent nature resulting from a continual social feedback are particularly relevant to an agile requirements definition exercise. The reason is that agile requirements are inherently meant to be collaboration-intensive. However, while the benefits of social platforms are valuable, they are necessary and not sufficient in themselves for making the exercise effective. The emerging social software engineering discipline is about enabling community-driven creation, management and deployment of software by applying methods, processes and tools in online environments. In this paper, we report our work on a semantic and collaborative platform that combines the virtues of social software principles and the semantic web concepts to enable knowledge-assisted agile requirements definition.

What's the hash tag? Folksonomy, brand, and control: organising and owning conversations on Twitter.

by Jon Hickman

ECREA 2010, 12th-15th October 2010, Hamburg, Germany.

"Hash tagging" is a syntactical formation closely associated with the microblogging service Twitter. Hash... more "Hash tagging" is a syntactical formation closely associated with the microblogging service Twitter. Hash tags indicate that a message is related to a certain topic. Hash tags are formed by preceding a keyword with the symbol #, e.g. "#iranelection". The origins of hash tagging may be considered folksonomic in nature, in that the prac- tice originated through popular usage and gained popularity before finally being adopted as a technical feature by Twitter (Boyd et al 2010).
The use of hash tags is widespread throughout the Twitter network, and the concept now finds a place in wider media discourses, for example news media often report on coalitions and campaigns which have formed online around certain hash tags (e.g. Sweney & Busfield 2010). As hash tagging becomes a common activity, the process becomes changed and is acted out in a variety of forms. Parallel networks, speaking through disparate discourses employ hash tagging to different ends, and may come into conflict when the resources (in this case a combination of letters after the # symbol) become scarce.
This paper considers social practices and discourses of hash tag- ging. Drawing on recent studies into twitter activity (Boyd et al 2010; Anstead & O’’Loughlin 2010) I map out the various uses to which the hash tag is employed, analysing relevant case studies. Modes of hash tagging include: humour (memes, pastiche), events, campaigns & awareness, curation & archive, and branding & corpo- ratisation. Humour and events tags are shown to be instrumental in generating and maintaining social capital (Bourdieu 1986); cam- paign & awareness tags are seen as a way of realising social capital for a social benefit, while participation in tagged conversation is suggested as a means to access the shared capital; curation & ar- chive tags are seen as being pragmatic in their outcomes; branding & corporatisation tags are similarly pragmatic but with an implied function of being exploited for commercial ends.
In particular I shall draw on an analysis of activity around the hash tag #esm in January 2010. The hash tag was subject to a dispute between two rival groups, with branding & corporatisation at the heart of their dispute. The confusion was seized upon by Twitter members outside of these groups as a subject of humour, with the hash tag employed in a memetic mode.
I conclude that this categorisation of hash tags may prove useful in analysing twitter activity as it will provide a basis for understanding the underlying intention behind the uses of hash tags. I also suggest that, as corporate culture and promotional discourses embrace social media activity more readily, disputes and issues of ownership are likely to occur.
Anstead, N. & O’’Loughlin, B. (2010) The Emerging Viewertariat: Explaining Twitter Responses to Nick Griffin’’s Appearance on BBC Question Time
UEA School of Political, Social and International Studies Working Paper Series Number 1: February, 2010
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) The Forms of Capital in Richardson, J (ed) (1986) Hand- book of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education Connecticut, Green- wood Press.
Boyd, D. Golder,S. & Lotan, G. (2010) ““Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.”” HICSS-43. IEEE: Kauai, HI, January 6. Sweney, M & Busfield, S. (2010) BBC to close two radio stations and halve web output after Tory pressure, The Guardian. 26th February 2010. Accessed at
http://bit.ly/9UST3R on 27/02/10

Establishing the value of socially created metadata to image indexing

by Besiki Stvilia

Stvilia, B., Jörgensen, C., & Wu, S. (2012). Establishing the value of socially created metadata to image indexing. Library & Information Science Research, 34(2), 99-109.

There have been ample suggestions in the literature that terms added to documents from Flickr and Wikipedia can... more There have been ample suggestions in the literature that terms added to documents from Flickr and Wikipedia can complement traditional methods of indexing and controlled vocabularies. At the same time, adding new metadata to existing metadata objects may not always add value to those objects. This research examines the potential added value of using user-contributed (“social”) terms from Flickr and the English Wikipedia in image indexing compared with using two expert-created controlled vocabularies—the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Our experiments confirmed that the social terms did provide added value relative to terms from the controlled vocabularies. The median rating for the usefulness of social terms was significantly higher than the baseline rating but was lower than the ratings for the terms from the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Furthermore, complementing the controlled vocabulary terms with social terms more than doubled the average coverage of participants’ terms for a photograph. The study also investigated the relationships between user demographics and users’ perceptions of the value of terms, as well as the relationships between user demographics and indexing quality, as measured by the number of terms participants assigned to a photograph. It was found that the participants with more tagging and indexing experience assigned a greater number of tags than did the other participants.

The Ontology of Tags

by David J. Saab

Social bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and CiteULike have adopted folksonomic systems where users tag... more Social bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and CiteULike have adopted folksonomic systems where users tag entities with keywords.  These tagging systems replace traditional taxonomic systems that employ hierarchical categorization schemes.  While there are some differences in how these tagging systems are constructed, e.g., as broad or narrow folksonomies, there has been confusion as to whether tagging constitutes a collaborative activity or a collective one.  The distinction between collaborative and collective influences the theoretical assumptions upon which research is conducted.  Researchers have adopted a semiotic theoretical perspective as an avenue for discerning emergent semantics of folksonomies.  If tagging systems are to be useful to social media or semantic technologies, if we are to indeed discern the semantics emergent from folksonomies, then we need to understand the ontology of tags.  This paper examines some of the fundamental ontological assumptions regarding tagging and folksonomies. 

An Emergent Culture Model for Discerning Tag Semantics in Folksonomies

by David J. Saab

In Proceedings of the iConference 2011, February 8-11, Seattle, WA.

Social bookmarking sites as Flickr, del.icio.us, and CiteULike have incorporated the use of tags as way for users to... more Social bookmarking sites as Flickr, del.icio.us, and CiteULike have incorporated the use of tags as way for users to retrieve photos, URLs, and citations in a way that is personally meaningful and which doesn't require learning taxonomies constructed by professionals. These tag sets, or folksonomies, have the potential to enhance interoperability among our information systems, especially those that use computational ontologies. Formal computational ontologies form the foundation for semantic interoperability, but seem to be insufficient in facilitating it because the ontologies developed for different information systems do not have an inherent mechanism for negotiating meaning or recognizing the natural evolution of a lexicon. Coupling folksonomies with formal ontologies holds potential for more productive semantic interoperability among systems. In order to reach that potential, we need to understand more clearly the process of discerning semantics in tag sets as entry points into the complex conceptual networks that generate meaning within cognition. This paper will explore that semantics involved in “emergent semantics” in tag sets and introduce an emergent culture model that will help clarify how folksonomies can be utilized in this endeavor.

Semantic Annotation of Images on Flickr

by Pierre Andrews

co-authored with: Pierre Andrews, Sergey Kanshin, Juan Pane, and Ilya Zaihrayeu
published at: Proceedings of the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011), Springer LNSC, Heraklion, Greece, May 29th - June 2nd, 2011.

In this paper we introduce an application that allows its users to have an explicit control on the meaning of tags... more In this paper we introduce an application that allows its users to have an explicit control on the meaning of tags they use when uploading photos on Flickr.
In fact, this application provides to the users an improved interface with which they can add concepts to photos instead of simple free-text tags.
They can thus directly provide semantic tags for their photos that can then be used to improve services such as search.

Semantic Disambiguation in Folksonomy: a Case Study

by Pierre Andrews

co-authored with: Pierre Andrews, Juan Pane, and Ilya Zaihrayeu

published in: Advanced Language Technologies for Digital Libraries, Springer's Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS), Hot Topic subline, 2011.

  Social annotation systems such as del.icio.us, Flickr and others have gained tremendous popularity among Web... more   Social annotation systems such as del.icio.us, Flickr and others have gained tremendous popularity among Web 2.0 users. One of the factors of success was the simplicity of the underlying model, which consists of a resource (e.g., a web page), a tag (e.g., a text string), and a user who annotates the resource with the tag. However, due to the syntactic nature of the underlying model, these systems have been criticised for not being able to take into account the explicit semantics implicitly encoded by the users in each tag.
  In this article we: a) provide a formalisation of an annotation model in which tags are based on concepts instead of being free text strings; b) describe how an existing annotation system can be converted to the proposed model; c) report on the results of such a conversion on the example of a del.icio.us dataset; and d) show how the quality of search can be improved by the semantic in the converted dataset.

On Tags and Signs: A Semiotic Analysis of Folksonomies

by Glen Farrelly

published in Faculty of Information Quarterly, 2009

The practice of tagging resources on the Internet has become a popular activity on such websites as Delicious, Flickr,... more The practice of tagging resources on the Internet has become a popular activity on such websites as Delicious, Flickr, Technorati, CiteULike, and LibraryThing, making tagging a key method to enable online information retrieval and sharing. When tagging is done by members of the general public, it is known as a folksonomy. Folksonomies, unlike many other forms of communication, are created by individuals acting in isolation from one another and with no coordinated effort. Yet when the individual practice of tagging resources is shared openly difficulties in meaning arise, due in part to the lack of sufficient message coding and ambiguous connotations.