TY - GEN
T1 - Trail patterns in social tagging systems
T2 - 5th International Conference on Foundations of Augmented Cognition, FAC 2009, Held as Part of HCI International 2009
AU - Kannampallil, Thomas George
AU - Fu, Wai Tat
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - The popularity of social information systems has been driven by their ability to help users manage, organize and share online resources. Though the research exploring the use of tags is relatively new, two things are widely acknowledged in the research community: (a) tags act as a medium for social collaboration, navigation and browsing and (b) an overall stable equilibrium exists among tag patterns due to the social nature of the tagging process. But there is very little agreement on what causes these stable patterns. In this paper, we take an evolutionary perspective to understand the process of tagging to investigate whether tags act as "way finders" or digital pheromones in social tagging systems. We investigate the existence of tag trails based on a semantic similarity measure among existing tags. We found that over 50% of the resources we evaluated exhibited strong trail patterns. The implications of these patterns for the design and management of social tagging systems is discussed.
AB - The popularity of social information systems has been driven by their ability to help users manage, organize and share online resources. Though the research exploring the use of tags is relatively new, two things are widely acknowledged in the research community: (a) tags act as a medium for social collaboration, navigation and browsing and (b) an overall stable equilibrium exists among tag patterns due to the social nature of the tagging process. But there is very little agreement on what causes these stable patterns. In this paper, we take an evolutionary perspective to understand the process of tagging to investigate whether tags act as "way finders" or digital pheromones in social tagging systems. We investigate the existence of tag trails based on a semantic similarity measure among existing tags. We found that over 50% of the resources we evaluated exhibited strong trail patterns. The implications of these patterns for the design and management of social tagging systems is discussed.
KW - Pheromones
KW - Social Tagging Systems (STS)
KW - Stigmergy
KW - Web 2.0
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77951985492&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-02812-0_20
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-02812-0_20
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:77951985492
SN - 364202811X
SN - 9783642028113
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 165
EP - 174
BT - Foundations of Augmented Cognition
Y2 - 19 July 2009 through 24 July 2009
ER -