TY  - CONF
AU  - Chi, Ed H.
AU  - Mytkowicz, Todd
A2  - 
T1  - Understanding the efficiency of social tagging systems using information theory
T2  - HT '08: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
PB  - ACM
CY  - New York, NY, USA
PY  - 2008/
M2  - 
VL  - 
IS  - 
SP  - 81
EP  - 88
UR  - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1379110&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=37458772&CFTOKEN=13998061&ret=1
M3  - 10.1145/1379092.1379110
KW  - bookmarking
KW  - efficiency
KW  - folksonomy
KW  - information
KW  - social
KW  - tagging
KW  - theory
L1  - 
SN  - 978-1-59593-985-2
N1  - Understanding the efficiency of social tagging systems using information theory
N1  - 
AB  - Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved tagging vocabulary in describing underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional "vocabulary problem" with ontology? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for encoding navigation paths to information sources. We show that information theory provides a natural and interesting way to understand this efficiency - or the descriptive, encoding power of tags. Our results indicate the efficiency of tags appears to be waning. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide insight into how our methods can be used to design more usable social tagging software.
ER  -