The Language of Folksonomies: What Tags Reveal About User Classification
C. Veres. Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, volume 3999 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 58--69. Berlin/Heidelberg, Springer, (2006)
Abstract
Folksonomies are classification schemes that emerge from the collective actions of users who tag resources with an unrestricted
set of key terms. There has been a flurry of activity in this domain recently with a number of high profile web sites andsearch engines adopting the practice. They have sparked a great deal of excitement and debate in the popular and technicalliterature, accompanied by a number of analyses of the statistical properties of tagging behavior. However, none has addressedthe deep nature of folksonomies. What is the nature of a tag? Where does it come from? How is it related to a resource? Inthis paper we present a study in which the linguistic properties of folksonomies reveal them to contain, on the one hand,tags that are similar to standard categories in taxonomies. But on the other hand, they contain additional tags to describeclass properties. The implications of the findings for the relationship between folksonomy and ontology are discussed.
