Understanding the efficiency of social tagging systems using information theory Export

@inproceedings{citeulike:3174634, abstract = {Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved tagging vocabulary in describing underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional "vocabulary problem" with ontology? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for encoding navigation paths to information sources. We show that information theory provides a natural and interesting way to understand this efficiency - or the descriptive, encoding power of tags. Our results indicate the efficiency of tags appears to be waning. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide insight into how our methods can be used to design more usable social tagging software.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Chi, Ed H. and Mytkowicz, Todd}, booktitle = {HT '08: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia}, citeulike-article-id = {3174634}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1379092.1379110}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379110}, doi = {10.1145/1379092.1379110}, isbn = {978-1-59593-985-2}, keywords = {socialbookmarking, socialnavigation, socialtagging, toread}, location = {Pittsburgh, PA, USA}, pages = {81--88}, posted-at = {2008-10-19 05:39:42}, priority = {2}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Understanding the efficiency of social tagging systems using information theory}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379110}, year = {2008} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:3174634 L3 - citeulike-article-id:3174634 N2 - Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved tagging vocabulary in describing underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional "vocabulary problem" with ontology? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for encoding navigation paths to information sources. We show that information theory provides a natural and interesting way to understand this efficiency - or the descriptive, encoding power of tags. Our results indicate the efficiency of tags appears to be waning. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide insight into how our methods can be used to design more usable social tagging software. CY - Pittsburgh, PA, USA SN - 978-1-59593-985-2 AD - New York, NY, USA EP - 88 TI - Understanding the efficiency of social tagging systems using information theory PB - ACM T2 - HT '08: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia SP - 81 KW - socialbookmarking KW - socialnavigation KW - socialtagging KW - toread AU - Chi, Ed AU - Mytkowicz, Todd PY - 2008/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379110 ER -