Folksonomy Tags Research Articles

Enhancing Folksonomy-Based Content Retrieval with Semantic Web Technology

While Flickr, a widely-known photo sharing system, allows users to describe their own photos with tags (aka. folksonomy tags) for indexing purposes, its tag-based photo retrieval function is severely hampered by the inherent nature of folksonomy tags. This paper presents SemFlickr, an application which enhances the search in Flickr with its semantic query suggestion feature. SemFlickr employs SQORE, an ontology retrieval system, to retrieve relevant ontologies from the Semantic Web and then derives query term suggestions from those ontologies. To ensure that the highly related photos will appear at the top of the results, SemFlickr takes the ontological relations among the given query terms to assign tag scores and then generates its ranked results. Experimental outcomes are encouraging and reveal a number of useful insights for developing applications that integrate the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 together.

The Effectiveness of Latent Semantic Analysis for Building Up a Bottom-up Taxonomy from Folksonomy Tags

In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of a semantic smoothing technique to organize folksonomy tags. Folksonomy tags have no explicit relations and vary because they form uncontrolled vocabu...

Patron Preferences for Folksonomy Tags: Research Findings When Both Hierarchial Subject Headings and Folksonomy Tags Are Used

Objective: With the emergence of folksonomy as an option for subject tagging, discussions have ensued about the costs and benefits of continuing to construct and apply traditional subject headings, given that patrons now can generate their own tags. To date, there are very few databases that allow both systems to coexist.
 
 Methods: Within the full text ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) database at Montana State University, both traditional, hierarchical subject headings and patron applied tags are allowed. Patrons are encouraged to tag and the database even features a browse tag capability and a featured ETD. After 24 months of coexistence, data was gathered and analyzed to determine patron use and preferences when given the option of adding their own tags. 
 
 Results: Very few patrons take advantage of adding their own tags. After 2 years, only 2.5 percent of the ETDs have acquired folksonomy tags. A gradual replacement of LCSH headings by patron tags has not occurred. 
 
 Conclusions: The main preference for patron-generated tags can be characterized as very narrow in application and in general would have been disallowed under a traditional library subject heading scheme. Despite the low usage, the folksonomy tags are a positive focal point and have generated collaboration within the database.

대학도서관 폭소노미 태그의 형태적 특성에 관한 연구

이 연구는 국내 대학도서관 폭소노미 태그의 형태적 특성을 분석하여, 통제어휘 개발 가이드라인과 비교해볼 때 어떠한 특징이 있는지 검토하기 위한 것이다. 연구대상으로 선정된 대학도서관의 6개월간 태그를 토대로, 폭소노미 태그의 구조와 형태를 조사하였다. 분석 대상 태그들은 시소러스 개발 가이드라인을 토대로 조사 분석하였다. 이 연구 결과는 디지털도서관에 폭소노미 태그의 활용 방안에 관한 기초자료를 제공할 것이다. This study was to review the possible characteristics and patterns that occur when comparing control language constructing guidelines, by analyzing the formal characteristics of folksonomy tags in university libraries. Based on subjected tags at university libraries for a period of 6 months the structure and form of folksonomy was examined. The object tags were analyzed based on the thesaurus development guidelines. The results for this research will provide baseline data for the use of folksonomy tag applications in digital libraries.

The Structure and Form of Folksonomy Tags: The Road to the Public Library Catalog

This article examines the linguistic structure of folksonomy tags collected over a thirty-day period from the daily tag logs of Del.icio.us, Furl, and Technorati. The tags were evaluated against the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) guidelines for the construction of controlled vocabularies. The results indicate that the tags correspond closely to the NISO guidelines pertaining to types of concepts expressed, the predominance of single terms and nouns, and the use of recognized spelling. Problem areas pertain to the inconsistent use of count nouns and the incidence of ambiguous tags in the form of homographs, abbreviations, and acronyms. With the addition of guidelines to the construction of unambiguous tags and links to useful external reference sources, folksonomies could serve as a powerful, flexible tool for increasing the user-friendliness and interactivity of public library catalogs, and also may be useful for encouraging other activities, such as informal online communities of readers and user-driven readers’ advisory services.

The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful?

The weighted list, known popularly as a `tag cloud', has appeared on many popular folksonomy-based web-sites. Flickr, Delicious, Technorati and many others have all featured a tag cloud at some point in their history. However, it is unclear whether the tag cloud is actually useful as an aid to finding information. We conducted an experiment, giving participants the option of using a tag cloud or a traditional search interface to answer various questions. We found that where the information-seeking task required specific information, participants preferred the search interface. Conversely, where the information-seeking task was more general, participants preferred the tag cloud. While the tag cloud is not without value, it is not sufficient as the sole means of navigation for a folksonomy-based dataset.

Exploring the Value of Folksonomies for Creating Semantic Metadata

Finding good keywords to describe resources is an on-going problem. Typically, we select such words manually from a thesaurus of terms, or they are created using auto-matic keyword extraction techniques. Folksonomies are an increasingly well-populated source of unstructured tags describing Web resources. This article explores the value of the folksonomy tags as a potential source of keyword metadata by examining the relationship between folksonomies, community produced annotations, and keywords extracted by machines. The experiment has been carried out in two ways: subjectively, by asking two human indexers to evaluate the quality of the generated keywords from both systems; and automatically, by measuring the percentage of overlap between the folksonomy set and machine generated keywords set. The results of this experiment show that the folksonomy tags agree more closely with the human generated keywords than those automatically generated. The results also showed that the trained indexers pre-ferred the semantics of folksonomy tags compared to keywords extracted automatically. These results can be considered as evidence for the strong relationship of folksonomies to the human indexer’s mindset, demonstrating that folksonomies used in the del.icio.us bookmarking service are a potential source for generating semantic metadata to annotate Web resources.

Temperature regulator for close temperature control: E. N. Herzberg, J. Sci. Instrum., 37 (8), Aug. 1960, 285–289

In this paper we present the contextual tag cloud system: a novel application that helps users explore a large scale RDF dataset. Unlike folksonomy tags used in most traditional tag clouds, the tags in our system are ontological terms (classes and properties), and a user can construct a context with a set of tags that defines a subset of instances. Then in the contextual tag cloud, the font size of each tag depends on the number of instances that are associated with that tag and all tags in the context. Each contextual tag cloud serves as a summary of the distribution of relevant data, and by changing the context, the user can quickly gain an understanding of patterns in the data. Furthermore, the user can choose to include RDFS taxonomic and/or domain/range entailment in the calculations of tag sizes, thereby understanding the impact of semantics on the data. In this paper, we describe how the system can be used as a query building assistant, a data explorer for casual users, or a diagnosis tool for data providers. To resolve the key challenge of how to scale to Linked Data, we combine a scalable preprocessing approach with a specially-constructed inverted index, use three approaches to prune unnecessary counts for faster online computations, and design a paging and streaming interface. Together, these techniques enable a responsive system that in particular holds a dataset with more than 1.4 billion triples and over 380,000 tags. Via experimentation, we show how much our design choices benefit the responsiveness of our system.