The impact of resource title on tags in collaborative tagging systems

Abstract

Collaborative tagging systems are popular tools for organization, sharing and retrieval of web resources. Their success is due to their freedom and simplicity of use. To post a resource, the user should only define a set of tags that would position the resource in the system's data structure -- folksonomy. This data structure can serve as a rich source of information about relations between tags and concepts they represent. To make use of information collaboratively added to folksonomies, we need to understand how users make tagging decisions. Three factors that are believed to influence user tagging decisions are: the tags used by other users, the organization of user's personal repository and the knowledge model shared between users. In our work we examine the role of another potential factor -- resource title. Despite all the advantages of tags, tagging is a tedious process. To minimize the effort, users are likely to tag with keywords that are easily available. We show that resource title, as a source of useful tags, is easy to access and comprehend. Given a choice of two tags with the same meaning, users are likely to be influenced by their presence in the title. However, a factor that seems to have stronger impact on users' tagging decisions is maintaining the consistency of the personal profile of tags. The results of our study reveal a new, less idealistic picture of collaborative tagging systems, in which the collaborative aspect seems to be less important than personal gains and convenience.