On the Navigability of Social Tagging Systems

It is a widely held belief among designers of social tagging systems that tag clouds represent a useful tool for navigation. This is evident in, for example, the increasing number of tagging systems offering tag clouds for navigational purposes, which hints towards an implicit assumption that tag clouds support efficient navigation. In this paper, we examine and test this assumption from a network-theoretic perspective, and show that in many cases it does not hold. We first model navigation in tagging systems as a bipartite graph of tags and resources and then simulate the navigation process in such a graph. We use network-theoretic properties to analyse the navigability of three tagging datasets with regard to different user interface restrictions imposed by tag clouds. Our results confirm that tagresource networks have efficient navigation properties in theory, but they also show that popular user interface decisions (such as "pagination" combined with reverse-chronological...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SOCIALCOM
• Authors: Denis Helic, Christoph Trattner, Markus Strohmaier, Keith Andrews
• Keywords: Security Privacy, Social Tagging Systems, SOCIALCOM 2010, Tag Clouds, Useful Tool