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;
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;
Vittorio Loreto: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", P.le A. Moro, 2, 00185 Roma, Italy;

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

Abstract: A distributed classification paradigm known ascollaborative tagginghas 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, ortags. Here we leverage the social aspects of collaborative tagging and introduce a notion ofresource distancebased 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
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525908001817
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:11:y:2008:i:04:n:s0219525908001817

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525908001817

Access Statistics for this article

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

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