Social tagging

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Introduction

See also Social bookmarking sites, Social media landscape and Web 2.0

Social tagging is a popular way for web users to store, describe and classify documents and websites they want to track. By assigning tags to materials, users can collate, catalogue and rank useful content (to them) using their own digital filing system. In social bookmarking sites, social tags can be displayed in weighted lists as tag clouds and provide insight into the end-user's searching and tagging practices and habits. Similarly, a folksonomy is a web-based scheme of attaching natural language labels to content. Folksonomies are comparable to taxonomies because users attach labels to web content and the process is called tagging. As well as categorization, tagging makes information easier to find. A well-developed folksonomy is a shared vocabulary familiar to its primary users. Two examples of tagging tools are Furl and Flickr (some librarians do not see Flickr as a good example of tagging).

Connotea, Digg and CiteULike

A popular scientific tagging system that has emerged is Connotea, which is used in science is a good match for clinicians, scientists and researchers in medicine. Created in 2004 as a free online reference management service, Connotea is provided by Nature Publishing and considered a new breed of social bookmarking tools - tagging 2.0, as it were. Connotea is similar to CiteULike and Digg for academic papers and del.icio.us where users save links to websites, and it boasts numerous features taking it above and beyond what other tools provide. (See Lund et al) For example, it allows exporting of references to citation manager programs, such as Endnote, Reference Manager or JabRef. This means it is possible to save references when working on computers with no access to bibliographic software, and to import them in a completely open, hassle-free fashion. Originally developed as a scientific del.icio.us, Connotea was conceived by Nature's Technology department. See Connotea Wiki, and Ben Lund as project lead. It seeks to provide the best of tagging and citation software. It tracks 5000 bookmarks posted by more than 2000 users. Early promotion of the service was waived pending the development of certain key features to give it maturity and reliability, which is now seems to have achieved.

History

Tagging dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years, bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies springing up like Backflip, Blink, Quiver and others. Viable models for making money did not exist so this early period of tagging failed as the dot.com bubble burst. Contemporary concepts of social tagging took root with the launch of the web site Oneview. See the Supernova video about the site's history.

Functional overview

In social tagging/bookmarking systems, users store lists of Web resources. These lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view links by category, tags or randomly. Some taggers categorize their resources by informally assigned, user-defined keywords. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks associated with certain "tags", and rank resources by how many other users bookmark them. Social bookmarking services have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from tags assigned to resources by examining clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Advantages

Tagging systems have several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine Web crawler/spiders. All tag-based classification is done by human beings who understand the subject content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with contemporary search engines. Additionally, as people bookmark resources they find useful, certain popular resources are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably more useful for end-users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to them. Since the classification and ranking of resources is a continuously evolving process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to syndication feeds (see RSS) based on tags, or collection of tag terms. This allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged, and classified by other users.

Disadvantages

What are the drawbacks to tag-based systems?

• A lack of standardization (keywords, controlled terms or vocabularies)
• No standards for tag structure (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.)
• Mistagging due to spelling errors, tags with more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion,
• Highly unorthodox and "personalized" tags and no hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. sites labelled cheese and cheddar have no way to be linked because cheddar is a more specific category of cheese).

Separate (but related) tagging and social bookmarking services are, however, evolving rapidly, and these shortcomings will probably be addressed eventually.

References

• Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Collaboration (PDF)
• Barsky E, Purdon M. Introducing Web 2.0: social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians. JCHLA/JABSC 2006 27 (3): 65-67.
• Lund B, Hammond T, Flack M. Social bookmarking tools: a case study (Connotea). April 2005 (11)4
• Seven (7) Things you should know about social bookmarking
• Social Bookmarking Resources
• Social bookmarking tools: a general review
• University of Michigan, School of Information - Social Computing Specialization