Social tagging is one of the major phenomena transforming the World Wide Web from a static platform into an actively shared information space. This paper addresses various aspects of social tagging, including different views on the nature of social tagging, how to make use of social tags, and how to bridge social tagging with other Web functionalities; it discusses the use of facets to facilitate browsing and searching of tagging data; and it presents an analogy between bibliometrics and tagometrics, arguing that established bibliometric methodologies can be applied to analyze tagging behavior on the Web. Based on the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO), a Web crawler was built to harvest tag data from Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube in September 2007. In total, 1.8 million objects, including bookmarks, photos, and videos, 3.1 million taggers, and 12.1 million tags were collected and analyzed. Some tagging patterns and variations are identified and discussed. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
['Ying Ding', 'Elin K. Jacob', 'Zhixiong Zhang', 'Schubert Foo', 'Erjia Yan', 'Nicolas L. George', 'Lijiang Guo']
Perspectives on social tagging