Tag Clouds Presented By: Laura F. Bright February 27th, 2006 INF385T: Semantic Web Spring 2006 / Turnbull

Personal Introduction I am a...  PhD student in the Department of Advertising  An active partner at Seedling Online  Researcher with interests that include interactive advertising, usability, blogging, and perceived information flow in digital environments More information at:

Presentation Overview Tag Clouds: Definitions, Arguments & Examples Uses for Tag Clouds: Personal, Social, Corporate Tag Clouds & Advertising: Tagvertising? Research Application: Methods & Ideas Conclusions: The State of the Cloud Discussion Questions: Tag Your It!

What is a Tag? Technical Architecture Group (TAG) Descriptors that individuals assign to an object (i.e., a document or photo) Tags are used in collaborative categorizing projects across many areas, including: Personal Social Corporate Academic

Tags in the “Smart Data Continuum” 1.Logical Assertions 2.Classification 3.Formal Class Models 4.Rules 5.Trust Source: Daconta, Orbst & Smith (2003)

What is a Tag Cloud? From the technical perspective...  A “visual depiction of content tags” used within a digital environment From the visual design perspective...  A weighted list of frequently used terms Source:

Tag Cloud Characteristics Tags are arranged in alphabetical order Most frequently used tags are often in a larger, bolder font than other words Easy to search for most popular tags using alpha order and word size First tag cloud was on Flickr Idea based upon visual depictions of website referrers pulled from log file analysis Source:

Arguments For & Against “Tag Clouds are the new mullets... Brilliant as the idea remains, faddishness is choking its air supply.”   (Zeldman 2006) Tag Clouds are bringing visual structure to the information chaos. (Daconta et al 2003) “The relationships between the tags are what’s important, not so much the tags themselves.”   (Jon 2006) Tag Clouds can help find implied and hidden relationships in your data. (Daconta et al 2003) Tag Clouds are more meaningful to their creators than to those outside users who are exposed to them. (QTSaver Blog)

Example of a Tag Cloud Google Cloud - Aggregating the Wisdom and Madness of the Crowd

Example of a Tag Cloud The AdCloud - Classified Ads Cloud per City

Uses for Tag Clouds Knowledge Modeling Knowledge Retrieval Knowledge Integration

Tag Cloud Tool Example Tag Cloud Beta -

Tag Cloud Tool Example Create your own cloud code...

Tag Clouds & Advertising Paid tag placement & linkage in a given tag cloud on a specific site Example: Zoom Tags Example: The Ad Cloud ‘Advertise’ most frequently accessed content via tag clouds on corporate or non-profit websites to guide information flow Example: Connotea.org Your Tag Cloud on Your Blog / Website

Tag Clouds & Advertising Zoom Tags - For Advertisers & Publishers

Tagvertising on TagMan Hang-Man Game for Tags

Taxonomies & Tag Clouds Taxonomies are... “The classification of information entities in the form of a hierarchy, according to the presumed relationships of the real world entities that they represent.” (Daconta et al 2003, p146) Express the bare minimum of semantics needed to distinguish among the objects of your information space Taxonomies provide the basic information structure for a given space and the ontologies flesh it out

The Ontology Spectrum An ontology can range from.... and standardizes the meaning of a given domain.

Research Method and Ideas Integrated Qualitative Analysis (McCoy & Northcutt 2003) Method to generate tag clouds for a given domain within a given sample of people Focus group meets Mental Modeling Study how tag clouds are created by watching participants form groups of similar data Quantify most powerful relationships and form a system of how the given set of attributes are related to one another Helps to identify hidden relationships within a meaningful data set

Conclusions Superior decisions require superior knowledge - tagging helps this at all levels Tag clouds give a visual picture of what terms are most important to an individual or organization over time Help data organization efforts for visual learners, etc. Although they do seem faddish, it appears that they are here to stay for a bit at least

Discussion Questions I Are tag clouds really just visualized folksonomies? Do they really help build taxonomies and onotologies? In terms of business process reengineering, what do you think is the best approach for corporations to begin tagging their data, i.e. creating clouds? Do tag clouds seem like an appropriate navigation device for visual learners? Has anyone seen any research on this?

Discussion Questions II Do you agree that tag clouds would be an interesting way to study how folksonomies, etc. change over time for an individual, social group, corporation, etc.? When we talk about ontologies is it always in terms of the upper-case Semantic Web, e.g does ontology always infer top-down classification models?

References Daconta et al (2003) Semantic Web Jon (2006) ‘Tag Clouds: A Response’, Zeldman (2006) ‘Tag Clouds are the New Mullets’, and.html and.html experiment.html experiment.html

Thank You! Thanks for your time... Have a great day!