Tag! Are You It? Taxonomies & Folksonomies in Practice Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President, May 28, 2008

Overview About Alexander Street Press Is there value in social tagging? What lies behind the value Some practical examples The future

Alexander Street Press Performing Arts, Drama, and Film World Literature Womens History Religion Counseling Music Social and Cultural History Sociology Black Studies American Civil War

The People vs. The Machine vs

All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Wikipedia, entry on social bookmarking, May 24 th, 2008 The masses speak…

All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Wikipedia, entry on social bookmarking, May 24 th, 2008 The masses speak… Not all tag based classifications are done by humans – machine based tagging is large and growing Many humans dont understand or agree on the content of the resource Whos to say what the content actually is? Whos to say what a resource is? Social tagging requires computers to leverage collective human input using algorithms amongst other tools.

Actually its not the machine vs. the human – its the machine and the human

Another view…

Is there value in social tagging?

>3,000 photos of Alexandria, VA

Performance Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?, Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector Garcia-Molina Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University

Folksonomy

Cirrus on delicious Item # 22 describes cirrus (the cloud) 7 people tagged it.

Citeulike

FolksonomyTaxonomy Evolving termsGoodPoor New termsFastSlow Accuracy80%?95%? StructureLowHigh HierarchyBehavior generated (Popularity) Editor generated (Accuracy) Search PrecisionVariableConsistent CustomizationHighLow Search ExhaustivenessLowHigh Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy

Popularity Effectiveness Folksonomies Taxonomies Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy 49.7 m users (E-Bay) 2.7 Bn searches per month (Google) # of users * frequency of use * quality of use- (100 * bad use) ? Effectiveness Subject understanding * MLS training ? Effectiveness

Looking closer…

Internet Trust anti pattern Low High Medium Effectiveness 1. System started by trusted parties 2. Benefits from being non-hierarchical, easy participation, quality participants 3. Unwashed masses start using it 4. System almost breaks 5. Controls put in place AfterThe Journal of the Future, Geoffrey Bilder, SSP, 2005 Time

Social Tagging Personalization Speed Discovery Reach Versatility No standard keywords No standard structure/hierarchy Unorthodox and personal tags Multiple Meanings Mis-tagging due to spelling Synonym/antonym confusion Advertising Spamming The Good The BadThe Mixed

Active User assigns terms User selects terms User comments Human and machine interactions Passive Most commented, blogged ed, viewed, cited… Terms culled from associated articles, comments… Measuring link traffic, use, search terms matched to results. Data mining, authority inference, Googles Page rank, etc… Delici.ous, flickr

Much social tagging is a by-product of other processes Central place to store your bookmarks (Delicious) Place to share your photographs (Flickr) Place to meet friends (My Space) Store your bibliography (Zotero, Citeulike) Have fun (Google Image Labeller) Give students classwork (Alexander Street Press) Leveraging existing processes…

Activity vs. Passivity Active Passive Mixed Delicious ASP Submission tools Google Search Zotero Citeulike ASP Playlists

Issues – user tagging Tags Philadelphia?Shirts? Womens Rights? President?

Issues – granularity

Different views of the same item CAB – (Husbandry) Agricola (Agriculture) OSH-ROM (Occupational Health and Safety) Biosis (Species) Long term factors influencing combustion and burn rates in North American forests. David Jones, Journal of Forest Husbandry, Sept 1999.

Humans are good at…

What works… Playlists on ASPs music and video products – >20,000 users Over 120,000 playlists created so far 1,000 created by ASP 42,000 user created 80,000+ derivative playlists

Example – Dance in Video

Playlists

Summary

Social Tagging evolution Descriptive Power Suggestions, mapping Social Network Importance/Trust Currency Popularity Larger networks Trackback, RSS Feeds

A lot to offer It works best In (very) large networks When it is a byproduct or alongside another process It will always ends up being (partially) controlled Network effects arent open to most of us Discipline focus is the best way to add value The future of social tagging…

Man empowered by machine