Collaborative tagging has been quickly gaining ground because of its ability to recruit the activity of web users into effectively organizing and sharing vast amounts of information. Here we collect data from a popular system and investigate the statistical properties of tag co-occurrence. We introduce a stochastic model of user behavior embodying two main aspects of collaborative tagging: (i) a frequency-bias mechanism related to the idea that users are exposed to each other's tagging activity; (ii) a notion of memory - or aging of resources - in the form of a heavy-tailed access to the past state of the system. Remarkably, our simple modeling is able to account quantitatively for the observed experimental features, with a surprisingly high accuracy. This points in the direction of a universal behavior of users, who - despite the complexity of their own cognitive processes and the uncoordinated and selfish nature of their tagging activity - appear to follow simple activity patterns.

Currently, social bookmarking systems provide intuitive support for browsing locally their content. A global view is usually presented by the tag cloud of the system, but it does not allow a conceptual drill-down, e. g., along a conceptual hierarchy. In this paper, we present a clustering approach for computing such a conceptual hierarchy for a given folksonomy. The hierarchy is complemented with ranked lists of users and resources most related to each cluster. The rankings are computed using our FolkRank algorithm. We have evaluated our approach on large scale data from the del.icio.us bookmarking system.

A tagging community's vocabulary of tags forms the basis for social navigation and shared expression.We present a user-centric model of vocabulary evolution in tagging communities based on community influence and personal tendency. We evaluate our model in an emergent tagging system by introducing tagging features into the MovieLens recommender system.We explore four tag selection algorithms for displaying tags applied by other community members. We analyze the algorithms 'effect on vocabulary evolution, tag utility, tag adoption, and user satisfaction.