Building directories for social tagging systems

Today, a number of algorithms exist for constructing tag hierarchies from social tagging data. While these algorithms were designed with ontological goals in mind, we know very little about their properties from an information retrieval perspective, such as whether these tag hierarchies support efficient navigation in social tagging systems. The aim of this paper is to investigate the usefulness of such tag hierarchies (sometimes also called folksonomies from folk-generated taxonomy) as directories that aid navigation in social tagging systems. To this end, we simulate navigation of directories as decentralized search on a network of tags using Kleinberg’s model. In this model, a tag hierarchy can be applied as background knowledge for decentralized search. By constraining the visibility of nodes in the directories we aim to mimic typical constraints imposed by a practical user interface (UI), such as limiting the number of displayed subcategories or related categories. Our experim...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Denis Helic, Markus Strohmaier
• Keywords: CIKM 2011, Hypermedia Navigation, Information Interfaces, Information Storage And Retrieval, Information Technology