Power tags as tools for social knowledge organization systems

Abstract

Web services are popular which allow users to collaboratively index and describe web resources with folksonomies. In broad folksonomies tag distributions for every single resource can be observed. Popular tags can be understood as "implicit consensus" where users have a shared understanding of tags as best matching descriptors for the resource. We call these high-frequent tags "power tags". If the collective intelligence of the users becomes visible in tags, we can conclude that power tags obtain the characteristics of community controlled vocabulary which allows the building of a social knowledge organization system (KOS). The paper presents an approach for building a folksonomy-based social KOS and results of a research project in which the relevance of assigned tags for particular URLs in the social bookmarking system delicious has been evaluated. Results show which tags were considered relevant and whether relevant tags can be found among power tags. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.