TY - GEN

T1 - Can all tags be used for search?

AU - Bischoff, Kerstin

AU - Firan, Claudiu S.

AU - Nejdl, Wolfgang

AU - Paiu, Raluca

PY - 2008/10/26

Y1 - 2008/10/26

N2 - Collaborative tagging has become an increasingly popular means for sharing and organizingWeb resources, leading to a huge amount of user generated metadata. These tags represent quite a few different aspects of the resources they describe and it is not obvious whether and how these tags or subsets of them can be used for search. This paper is the first to present an in-depth study of tagging behavior for very different kinds of resources and systems - Web pages (Del.icio.us), music (Last.fm), and images (Flickr) - and compares the results with anchor text characteristics. We analyze and classify sample tags from these systems, to get an insight into what kinds of tags are used for different resources, and provide statistics on tag distributions in all three tagging environments. Since even relevant tags may not add new information to the search procedure, we also check overlap of tags with content, with metadata assigned by experts and from other sources. We discuss the potential of different kinds of tags for improving search, comparing them with user queries posted to search engines as well as through a user survey. The results are promising and provide more insight into both the use of different kinds of tags for improving search and possible extensions of tagging systems to support the creation of potentially search-relevant tags.

AB - Collaborative tagging has become an increasingly popular means for sharing and organizingWeb resources, leading to a huge amount of user generated metadata. These tags represent quite a few different aspects of the resources they describe and it is not obvious whether and how these tags or subsets of them can be used for search. This paper is the first to present an in-depth study of tagging behavior for very different kinds of resources and systems - Web pages (Del.icio.us), music (Last.fm), and images (Flickr) - and compares the results with anchor text characteristics. We analyze and classify sample tags from these systems, to get an insight into what kinds of tags are used for different resources, and provide statistics on tag distributions in all three tagging environments. Since even relevant tags may not add new information to the search procedure, we also check overlap of tags with content, with metadata assigned by experts and from other sources. We discuss the potential of different kinds of tags for improving search, comparing them with user queries posted to search engines as well as through a user survey. The results are promising and provide more insight into both the use of different kinds of tags for improving search and possible extensions of tagging systems to support the creation of potentially search-relevant tags.

KW - Collaborative tagging

KW - Query classification

KW - Tag classification

KW - Tag search

KW - Tagging system analysis and comparison

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=70349264135&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/1458082.1458112

DO - 10.1145/1458082.1458112

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:70349264135

SN - 9781595939913

T3 - International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings

SP - 203

EP - 212

BT - Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM'08

PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

T2 - 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM'08

Y2 - 26 October 2008 through 30 October 2008

ER -