EMERGENT COMMUNITY STRUCTURE IN SOCIAL TAGGING SYSTEMS

Ciro Cattuto (), Andrea Baldassarri, Vito D. P. Servedio and Vittorio Loreto
Additional contact information
Ciro Cattuto: Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche "Enrico Fermi", Compendio Viminale, 00184 Roma, Italy; Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", P.le A. Moro, 2, 00185 Roma, Italy; Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Torino, Italy
Andrea Baldassarri: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", P.le A. Moro, 2, 00185 Roma, Italy
Vito D. P. Servedio: Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche "Enrico Fermi", Compendio Viminale, 00184 Roma, Italy; Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", P.le A. Moro, 2, 00185 Roma, Italy
Vittorio Loreto: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", P.le A. Moro, 2, 00185 Roma, Italy; Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Torino, Italy

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2008, vol. 11, issue 04, pages 597-608

Abstract: A distributed classification paradigm known as collaborative tagging has been widely adopted in new Web applications designed to manage and share online resources. Users of these applications organize resources (Web pages, digital photographs, academic papers) by associating with them freely chosen text labels, or tags. Here we leverage the social aspects of collaborative tagging and introduce a notion of resource distance based on the collective tagging activity of users. We collect data from a popular system and perform experiments showing that our definition of distance can be used to build a weighted network of resources with a detectable community structure. We show that this community structure clearly exposes the semantic relations among resources. The communities of resources that we observe are a genuinely emergent feature, resulting from the uncoordinated activity of a large number of users, and their detection paves the way for mapping emergent semantics in social tagging systems.

Keywords: Folksonomy; collaborative tagging; emergent semantics; online communities; Web 2.0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/details.cgi?type=pdf&id=pii:S0219525908001817 (application/pdf)
http://www.worldscinet.com/cgi-bin/details.cgi?typ ... ii:S0219525908001817 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:11:y:2008:i:04:p:597-608

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) is edited by Frank Schweitzer

More articles in Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Series data maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().