Analyzing Tag Semantics Across Collaborative Tagging Systems

The objective of our group was to exploit state-of-the-art Information Retrieval methods for finding associations and dependencies between tags, capturing and representing differences in tagging behavior and vocabulary of various folksonomies, with the overall aim to better understand the semantics of tags and the tagging process. Therefore we analyze the semantic content of tags in the Flickr and Delicious folksonomies. We find that: tag context similarity leads to meaningful results in Flickr, despite its narrow folksonomy character; the comparison of tags across Flickr and Delicious shows little semantic overlap, being tags in Flickr associated more to visual aspects rather than technological as it seems to be in Delicious; there are regions in the tag-tag space, provided with the cosine similarity metric, that are characterized by high density; the order of tags inside a post has a semantic relevance.