Using tag clouds to promote community awareness in research environments

Abstract

Tag clouds have become a popular visualisation scheme for presenting an overview of the content of document collections. We describe how we have adapted tag clouds to provide visual summaries of researchers' activities and use these to promote awareness within a research group. Each user is associated with a tag cloud that is generated automatically based on the documents that they read and write and is integrated into an ambient information system that we have implemented. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.