Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

An Overview of Social Tagging and Applications

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Social Network Data Analytics

Abstract

Social tagging on online portals has become a trend now. It has emerged as one of the best ways of associating metadata with web objects. With the increase in the kinds of web objects becoming available, collaborative tagging of such objects is also developing along new dimensions. This popularity has led to a vast literature on social tagging. In this survey paper, we would like to summarize different techniques employed to study various aspects of tagging. Broadly, we would discuss about properties of tag streams, tagging models, tag semantics, generating recommendations using tags, visualizations of tags, applications of tags, integration of different tagging systems and problems associated with tagging usage. We would discuss topics like why people tag, what influences the choice of tags, how to model the tagging process, kinds of tags, different power laws observed in tagging domain, how tags are created and how to choose the right tags for recommendation. Metadata generated in the form of tags can be efficiently used to improve web search, for web object classification, for generating ontologies, for enhanced browsing etc. We would discuss these applications and conclude with thoughts on future work in the area.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Morgan Ames and Mor Naaman. Why we tag: Motivations for annotation in mobile and online media. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2007, Sam Jose, CA, April 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Shenghua Bao, Guirong Xue, Xiaoyuan Wu, Yong Yu, Ben Fei, and Zhong Su. Optimizing web search using social annotations. In WWW ’07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 501–510, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Scott Bateman, Christopher Brooks, Gordon Mccalla, and Peter Brusilovsky. Applying collaborative tagging to e-learning. In Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Grigory Begelman, Philipp Keller, and Frank Smadja. Automated tag clustering: Improving search and exploration in the tag space, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  5. K. Bielenberg. Groups in Social Software: Utilizing Tagging to Integrate Individual Contexts for Social Navigation. Master’s thesis, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  6. David M. Blei, Andrew Y. Ng, and Michael I. Jordan. Latent dirichlet allocation. J. Mach. Learn. Res., 3:993–1022, 2003.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Christopher H. Brooks and Nancy Montanez. Improved annotation of the blogosphere via autotagging and hierarchical clustering. In WWW ’06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 625–632, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  8. David Carmel, Haggai Roitman, and Elad Yom-Tov. Who tags the tags?: a framework for bookmark weighting. In CIKM ’09: Proceeding of the 18th ACMconference on Information and knowledge management, pages 1577–1580, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Luigi Di Caro, K. Selçuk Candan, and Maria Luisa Sapino. Using tagflake for condensing navigable tag hierarchies from tag clouds. In Ying Li, Bing Liu, and Sunita Sarawagi, editors, KDD, pages 1069–1072. ACM, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ciro Cattuto, Andrea Baldassarri, Vito D. P. Servedio, and Vittorio Loreto. Vocabulary growth in collaborative tagging systems, Apr 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ciro Cattuto, Vittorio Loreto, and Luciano Pietronero. Semiotic dynamics and collaborative tagging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 104(5):1461–1464, January 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Klaas Dellschaft and Steffen Staab. An epistemic dynamic model for tagging systems. In HT ’08: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, pages 71–80, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Nicholas Diakopoulos and Patrick Chiu. Photoplay: A collocated collaborative photo tagging game on a horizontal display. preprint (2007) available at http://www.fxpal.com/publications/FXPAL-PR-07-414.pdf.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Pavel A. Dmitriev, Nadav Eiron, Marcus Fontoura, and Eugene Shekita. Using annotations in enterprise search. In WWW ’06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 811–817, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Micah Dubinko, Ravi Kumar, Joseph Magnani, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Andrew Tomkins. Visualizing tags over time. In WWW ’06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 193–202, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Scott Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman. The structure of collaborative tagging systems, Aug 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin. Folksonomies: Tidying up tags? D-Lib

    Google Scholar 

  18. Magazine, 12, Jan[18] Harry Halpin, Valentin Robu, and Hana Shepherd. The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging. In WWW ’07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 211–220, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott. Social bookmarking tools (i): A general review. D-Lib Magazine, 11(4), April 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Y. Hassan-Montero and V. Herrero-Solana. Improving tag-clouds as visual information retrieval interfaces. In InScit2006: International Conference on Multidisciplinary Information Sciences and Technologies, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  21. M. Heckner, M. Heilemann, and C.Wolff. Personal information management vs. resource sharing: Towards a model of information behaviour in social tagging systems. In Int’l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), San Jose, CA, USA, May 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Paul Heymann and Hector Garcia-Molina. Collaborative creation of communal hierarchical taxonomies in social tagging systems. Technical Report 2006-10, Stanford University, April 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector Garcia-Molina. Can social bookmarking improve web search? In WSDM ’08: Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining, pages 195–206, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Andreas Hotho, Robert Jäschke, Christoph Schmitz, and Gerd Stumme. Information retrieval in folksonomies: Search and ranking. The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, pages 411–426, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Jon Iturrioz, Oscar Diaz, and Cristobal Arellano. Towards federated web2.0 sites: The tagmas approach. In Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization Workshop, WWW07, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Owen Kaser and Daniel Lemire. Tag-cloud drawing: Algorithms for cloud visualization, May 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Margaret E. I. Kipp and Grant D. Campbell. Patterns and inconsistencies in collaborative tagging systems : An examination of tagging practices. In Annual General Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. American Society for Information Science and Technology, November 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Georgia Koutrika, Frans A. Effendi, Zolt’n Gyöngyi, Paul Heymann, and Hector G. Molina. Combating spam in tagging systems: An evaluation. ACM Trans. Web, 2(4):1–34, 2008.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Christian Körner. Understanding the motivation behind tagging. ACM Student Research Competition - Hypertext 2009, July 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Liz Lawley. social consequences of social tagging. Web article, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Rui Li, Shenghua Bao, Yong Yu, Ben Fei, and Zhong Su. Towards effective browsing of large scale social annotations. InWWW’07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 943–952, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Xin Li, Lei Guo, and Yihong E. Zhao. Tag-based social interest discovery. In WWW ’08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 675–684, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Dong Liu, Xian S. Hua, Linjun Yang, Meng Wang, and Hong J. Zhang. Tag ranking. In WWW ’09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web, pages 351–360, New York, NY, USA, April 2009. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, Danah Boyd, and Marc Davis. Ht06, tagging paper, taxonomy, flickr, academic article, toread. In HYPERTEXT ’06: Proceedings of the seventeenth conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, pages 31–40, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  35. A.Mathes. Folksonomies - cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. Computer Mediated Communication, December 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  36. David R. Millen and Jonathan Feinberg. Using social tagging to improve social navigation. In Workshop on the Social Navigation and Community based Adaptation Technologies, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Michael G. Noll and Christoph Meinel. The metadata triumvirate: Social annotations, anchor texts and search queries. WI/IAT ’08: Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on, 1:640–647, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Simon Overell, Börkur Sigurbjörnsson, and Roelof van Zwol. Classifying tags using open content resources. In WSDM ’09: Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pages 64–73, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Lars Pind. Folksonomies: How we can improve the tags. Web article, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Peter Pirolli. Rational analyses of information foraging on the web. Cognitive Science, 29(3):343–373, 2005.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Emanuele Quintarelli. Folksonomies: power to the people.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Daniel Ramage, Paul Heymann, Christopher D. Manning, and Hector G. Molina. Clustering the tagged web. In WSDM ’09: Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pages 54–63, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Tye Rattenbury, Nathaniel Good, and Mor Naaman. Towards automatic extraction of event and place semantics from flickr tags. In SIRIR ’07: Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, pages 103–110, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Terrell Russell. cloudalicious: folksonomy over time. In JCDL ’06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, pages 364–364, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Ralf Schenkel, Tom Crecelius, Mouna Kacimi, Sebastian Michel, Thomas Neumann, Josiane X. Parreira, and Gerhard Weikum. Efficient top-k querying over social-tagging networks. In SIGIR ’08: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, pages 523–530, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Christoph Schmitz, Andreas Hotho, Robert Jäschke, and Gerd Stumme. Mining association rules in folksonomies. In Data Science and Classification, pages 261– 270. Springer, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Patrick Schmitz. Inducing ontology from flickr tags. InWWW2006WWW 2006, May 22˝U26, 2006, Edinburgh, UK. IW3C2, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Shilad Sen, Shyong K. Lam, Al Mamunur Rashid, Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Jeremy Osterhouse, F.Maxwell Harper, and John Riedl. tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. In CSCW ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pages 181–190, New York, NY, USA, November 2006. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Börkur Sigurbjörnsson and Roelof van Zwol. Flickr tag recommendation based on collective knowledge. In WWW ’08: Proceeding of the 17 th International Conference onWorldWideWeb, pages 327–336, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Herbert A. Simon. On a class of skew distribution functions. Biometrika, 42(3/4):425–440, 1955.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  51. James Sinclair and Michael Cardew-Hall. The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful? J. Inf. Sci., 34(1):15–29, 2008.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  52. Yang Song, Ziming Zhuang, Huajing Li, Qiankun Zhao, Jia Li, Wang C. Lee, and C. Lee Giles. Real-time automatic tag recommendation. In SIGIR ’08: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, pages 515–522, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Lucia Specia and Enrico Motta. Integrating folksonomies with the semantic web. In ESWC ’07: Proceedings of the 4th European conference on The Semantic Web, pages 624–639, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007. Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Louise F. Spiteri. Structure and form of folksonomy tags: The road to thepublic library catalogue. Webology, 4(2, Artikel 41), 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Martin Szomszor, Ivan Cantador, and Harith Alani. Correlating user profiles from multiple folksonomies. In ACM Confrence on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  56. Csaba Veres. The language of folksonomies: What tags reveal about user classification. In Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, volume 3999/2006 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 58–69, Berlin / Heidelberg, July 2006. Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Robert Wetzker, Carsten Zimmermann, and Christian Bauckhage. Analyzing social bookmarking systems: A del.icio.us cookbook. In Proceedings of the ECAI 2008 Mining Social Data Workshop, pages 26–30. IOS Press, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  58. Lei Wu, Linjun Yang, Nenghai Yu, and Xian S. Hua. Learning to tag. In WWW ’09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web, pages 361–370, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  59. X.Wu, L. Zhang, and Y. Yu. Exploring social annotations for the semantic web. In Proc. of the 15th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW’06), 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  60. Shengliang Xu, Shenghua Bao, Ben Fei, Zhong Su, and Yong Yu. Exploring folksonomy for personalized search. In SIGIR ’08: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACMSIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, pages 155–162, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Zhichen Xu, Yun Fu, Jianchang Mao, and Difu Su. Towards the semantic web: Collaborative tag suggestions. In WWW2006: Proceedings of the Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  62. Zhijun Yin, Rui Li, Qiaozhu Mei, and Jiawei Han. Exploring social tagging graph for web object classification. In KDD ’09: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, pages 957–966, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  63. Ding Zhou, Jiang Bian, Shuyi Zheng, Hongyuan Zha, and C. Lee Giles. Exploring social annotations for information retrieval. InWWW’08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 715–724, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  64. Arkaitz Zubiaga. Enhancing navigation on wikipedia with social tags. In Wikimania ’09, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Champaign, USA

    Manish Gupta, Rui Li, Zhijun Yin & Jiawei Han

Authors
  1. Manish Gupta
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Rui Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Zhijun Yin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Jiawei Han
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manish Gupta .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM, Skyline Drive 19, Hawthorne, 10532, New York, USA

    Charu C. Aggarwal

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Gupta, M., Li, R., Yin, Z., Han, J. (2011). An Overview of Social Tagging and Applications. In: Aggarwal, C. (eds) Social Network Data Analytics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8462-3_16

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8462-3_16

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-8461-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-8462-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation