Structures in Collaborative Tagging An Empirical Analysis

It is widely believed that users choose meaningful tags; that the combinations of these tags from mul-tiple users helps to elicit meaning for tagged ob-jects; and that implicit communities can be discov-ered among the users who use a particular tag or tag a particular object. We examine data on tagging prac-tices from the Delicious web site (delicious.com) and find that there is little support for any of these beliefs. Although users individually do seem to have a small set of tags that they use in a controlled and effective way, they also use very large sets of other tags in a much more haphazard way. These poorly managed tags obscure much of the collective sense making and implicit community structure. We derive some suggestions for improving collaborative tagging systems