HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr, academic article, to read

TLDR

Tagging systems have become popular for adding user‑generated keywords to web resources, offering benefits for search, spam detection, reputation, personal organization, social communication, and data mining, yet they remain under‑studied. The paper surveys existing academic work, proposes a conceptual model and taxonomy of web‑based tagging systems, and outlines incentive frameworks to guide future research. The authors present a model and taxonomy of tagging systems and incentive structures, and illustrate them with a preliminary analysis of Flickr. The preliminary Flickr study highlights gaps and suggests future research directions in tagging systems.

Abstract

In recent years, tagging systems have become increasingly popular. These systems enable users to add keywords (i.e., "tags") to Internet resources (e.g., web pages, images, videos) without relying on a controlled vocabulary. Tagging systems have the potential to improve search, spam detection, reputation systems, and personal organization while introducing new modalities of social communication and opportunities for data mining. This potential is largely due to the social structure that underlies many of the current systems.Despite the rapid expansion of applications that support tagging of resources, tagging systems are still not well studied or understood. In this paper, we provide a short description of the academic related work to date. We offer a model of tagging systems, specifically in the context of web-based systems, to help us illustrate the possible benefits of these tools. Since many such systems already exist, we provide a taxonomy of tagging systems to help inform their analysis and design, and thus enable researchers to frame and compare evidence for the sustainability of such systems. We also provide a simple taxonomy of incentives and contribution models to inform potential evaluative frameworks. While this work does not present comprehensive empirical results, we present a preliminary study of the photo-sharing and tagging system Flickr to demonstrate our model and explore some of the issues in one sample system. This analysis helps us outline and motivate possible future directions of research in tagging systems.