How users employ various popular tags to annotate resources in social tagging: An empirical study

Xuwei Pan, Shenglan He, Xiyong Zhu and Qingmiao Fu

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2016, vol. 67, issue 5, 1121-1137

Abstract: This paper focuses on exploring the usage patterns and regularities of co‐employment of various popular tags and their relationships with the activeness of users and the interest level of resources in social tagging. A hypernetwork for social tagging is constructed in which a tagging action is expressed as a hyperedge and the user, resource, and tag are expressed as nodes. Quantitative measures for the constructed hypernetwork are defined, including the hyperdegree and its distribution, the excess average hyperdegree, and the hyperdegree conditional probability distribution. Using the data set from Delicious, an empirical study was conducted. The empirical results show that multiple individual tags and one or very few popular tags are generally employed together in one tagging action, and the usage patterns and regularities of tags with varying popularity are correlated to both user activity and resource interest. The empirical results are further discussed and explained from the perspectives of tag functions and motivations. Finally, suggestions regarding the usage of various popular tags for both tagging users and service providers of social tagging are given.

Date: 2016
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