This is a preliminary version of the JASIST submission. Perspectives on Social Tagging

Social tagging is one of the major phenomena transforming the World Wide Web from a static platform into an actively shared information space. This paper discusses various aspects of social tagging, including different views on the nature of social tagging, how best to make use of social tags, and how to bridge social tagging with other Web functionalities. It also discussed the facet management of tagging data to ease browsing and searching. The analogy between bibliometrics and tagometrics has been discussed and compared. Established bibliometric methodologies can be applied to analyze tagging behaviour on the Web. Based on the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO), the web crawler has been built up to crawl tag data from Delicious, Flickr and YouTube in September 2007. In total, 1.8M objects including bookmarks, photos and videos, 3.1M taggers and 12.1M tags have been collected and analysed. Some tagging patterns and variations have been identified and discussed