The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging

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 del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for "popular" sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Harry Halpin, Valentin Robu, Hana Shepherd
• Keywords: Collaborative Tagging Systems, Internet Technology, Power Law Distribution, Unsupervised Tagging, WWW 2007