The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging

Problem Tagging distributions tend to stabilize into powerlaw distributions. empirically determine as to why this pattern occurs and try to determine patterns prior to a stable distribution. The central question involved is when and how a coherent classification system might emerge from distributed tagging?

Solution Analyse tagging behaviour and their emperical results show that it does follow a powerlaw distribution. Dist(Ti, Tj) = N(Ti, Tj) / sqrt( N(Ti) * N(Tj) ) Based on these similarities they construct a tag-tag correlation graph or network. Size of Node = frequency of the tag. Distance = inverse of similarity between tags.

Criticism The information value of a tag suffers over time. Still human intervention needed. (Adversarial Nature) Tag Spam. There is no correspondence between keywords and concepts and it is not possible to do so with few keywords. Probably a combo of explicit (people) and implicit (software) ranking methods to get better tags and more useful search results.

Relation to what we learned in class Bottom-up approach to taxonomies/ontologies. It is a flat hierarchy. User Regulation – difficult. Because the user still uses keywords. The long tail phenomena.