Reuse, Temporal Dynamics, Interest Sharing, and Collaboration in Social Tagging Systems
This work addresses the need to understand user behavior in tagging systems to enhance collaborative content management, but it is incremental as it focuses on characterization rather than novel solutions.
The study characterized three social tagging systems (CiteULike, Connotea, and del.icio.us) by analyzing patterns of information production, temporal dynamics of user tag vocabularies, and social aspects, to understand usage characteristics for improving system design.
User-generated content is shaping the dynamics of the World Wide Web. Indeed, an increasingly large number of systems provide mechanisms to support the growing demand for content creation, sharing, and management. Tagging systems are a particular class of these systems where users share and collaboratively annotate content such as photos and URLs. This collaborative behavior and the pool of user-generated metadata create opportunities to improve existing systems and to design new mechanisms. However, to realize this potential, it is necessary to understand the usage characteristics of current systems. This work addresses this issue characterizing three tagging systems (CiteULike, Connotea and del.icio.us) while focusing on three aspects: i) the patterns of information (tags and items) production; ii) the temporal dynamics of users' tag vocabularies; and, iii) the social aspects of tagging systems.