The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging

@inproceedings{Halpin2007TheCD,
  title={The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging},
  author={Harry Halpin and V. Robu and Hana Shepherd},
  booktitle={WWW '07},
  year={2007}
}
The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classifications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site delicio. us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging… 
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683 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
53
Background Citations
346
Methods Citations
55
Results Citations
19

683 Citations

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This chapter uses the data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to empirically examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems and to study how coherent categorization schemes emerge from unsupervised tagging by individual users, which can then be considered a ‘stable’ Fregean sense manufactured by a social consensus.
Social Structure in Tagging Practices: Reality or Myth?
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The Epistemic Dynamic Model: Developing a Theory of Tagging Systems
TLDR
The Epistemic Dynamic Model is presented, which shows that the general shape of the tag frequency distribution and of the vocabulary growth have their origin in the shared background knowledge of the users, and shows that recommending the user his/her previously used tags helps to increase the inter-resource consistency.
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This work characterizes three tagging systems while focusing on three aspects: i) the patterns of information production; ii) the temporal dynamics of users’ tag vocabularies; and, iii) the social aspects of tagging systems.
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TLDR
The results show that tagging streams which are generated by a combination of imitation dynamics and shared background knowledge exhibit faster and higher semantic stability than tagging streamsWhich are generated via imitation dynamics or natural language phenomena alone.
Structures in collaborative tagging: an empirical analysis
TLDR
Data on tagging practices from the Delicious web site is examined and it is found that users individually do seem to have a small set of tags that they use in a controlled and effective way, but they also use very large sets of other tags in a much more haphazard way.
How the Nature of Web Services Drives Vocabulary Creation in Social Tagging
TLDR
To capture the microscopic mechanism of vocabulary creation, this research focuses on the relationship between the number of tags used in the same entry and the local vocabulary creation rate and finds that the relationship is not the result of a simple random process and differs between services.
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