Collaborative tagging systems are popular tools for organization, sharing and retrieval of web resources. Their success is due to their freedom and simplicity of use. To post a resource, the user should only define a set of tags that would position the resource in the system's data structure -- folksonomy. This data structure can serve as a rich source of information about relations between tags and concepts they represent. To make use of information collaboratively added to folksonomies, we need to understand how users make tagging decisions. Three factors that are believed to influence user tagging decisions are: the tags used by other users, the organization of user's personal repository and the knowledge model shared between users. In our work we examine the role of another potential factor -- resource title. Despite all the advantages of tags, tagging is a tedious process. To minimize the effort, users are likely to tag with keywords that are easily available. We show that resource title, as a source of useful tags, is easy to access and comprehend. Given a choice of two tags with the same meaning, users are likely to be influenced by their presence in the title. However, a factor that seems to have stronger impact on users' tagging decisions is maintaining the consistency of the personal profile of tags. The results of our study reveal a new, less idealistic picture of collaborative tagging systems, in which the collaborative aspect seems to be less important than personal gains and convenience.

Collaborative tagging systems are popular tools for organization, sharing and retrieval of web resources. Their success is due to their freedom and simplicity of use. To post a resource, the user should only define a set of tags that would position the resource in the system's data structure -- folksonomy. This data structure can serve as a rich source of information about relations between tags and concepts they represent. To make use of information collaboratively added to folksonomies, we need to understand how users make tagging decisions. Three factors that are believed to influence user tagging decisions are: the tags used by other users, the organization of user's personal repository and the knowledge model shared between users. In our work we examine the role of another potential factor -- resource title. Despite all the advantages of tags, tagging is a tedious process. To minimize the effort, users are likely to tag with keywords that are easily available. We show that resource title, as a source of useful tags, is easy to access and comprehend. Given a choice of two tags with the same meaning, users are likely to be influenced by their presence in the title. However, a factor that seems to have stronger impact on users' tagging decisions is maintaining the consistency of the personal profile of tags. The results of our study reveal a new, less idealistic picture of collaborative tagging systems, in which the collaborative aspect seems to be less important than personal gains and convenience.

The objective of a tag recommendation system is to propose a set of tags for a resource to ease the tagging process done manually by a user. Tag recommendation is an interesting and well defined research problem. However, while solving it, it is easy to forget about its practical implications. We discuss the practical aspects of tag recommendation and propose a system that successfully addresses the problem of learning in tag recommendation, without sacrificing efficiency. Learning is realized in two aspects: adaptation to newly added posts and parameter tuning. The content of each added post is used to update the resource and user profiles as well as associations between tags. Parameter tuning allows the system to automatically adjust the way tag sources (e.g., content related tags or user profile tags) are combined to match the characteristics of a specific collaborative tagging system. The evaluation on data from three collaborative tagging systems confirmed the importance of both learning methods. Finally, an architecture based on text indexing makes the system efficient enough to serve in real time collaborative tagging systems with number of posts counted in millions, given limited computing resources.

Citation graphs representing a body of scientific literature convey measures of scholarly activity and productivity. In this work we present a study of the structure of the citation graph of the computer science literature. Using a web robot we built several topic-specific citation graphs and their union graph from the digital library ResearchIndex. After verifying that the degree distributions follow a power law, we applied a series of graph theoretical algorithms to elicit an aggregate picture of the citation graph in terms of its connectivity. We discovered the existence of a single large weakly-connected and a single large biconnected component, and confirmed the expected lack of a large strongly-connected component. The large components remained even after removing the strongest authority nodes or the strongest hub nodes, indicating that such tight connectivity is widespread and does not depend on a small subset of important nodes. Finally, minimum cuts between authority papers of different areas did not result in a balanced partitioning of the graph into areas, pointing to the need for more sophisticated algorithms for clustering the graph.

Social networks and collaborative tagging systems are rapidly gaining popularity as a primary means for storing and sharing data among friends, family, colleagues, or perfect strangers as long as they have common interests. del.icio.us is a social network where people store and share their personal bookmarks. Most importantly, users tag their bookmarks for ease of information dissemination and later look up. However, it is the friendship links, that make delicious a social network. They exist independently of the set of bookmarks that belong to the users and have no relation to the tags typically assigned to the bookmarks. To study the interaction among users, the strength of the existing links and their hidden meaning, we introduce implicit links in the network. These links connect only highly "similar" users. Here, similarity can reflect different aspects of the user’s profile that makes her similar to any other user, such as number of shared bookmarks, or similarity of their tags clouds. We investigate the question whether friends have common interests, we gain additional insights on the strategies that users use to assign tags to their bookmarks, and we demonstrate that the graphs formed by implicit links have unique properties differing from binomial random graphs or random graphs with an expected power-law degree distribution.