Navigating One Million Tags

Web 2.0 users engage in collaborative activities. Many 2.0 websites allow their users to associate words (a.k.a. tags) with the users’ own and with other users’ content. The result is an additional layer with descriptions of web resources. The created associations between tag sets and web resources are used to facilitate social navigation, individual resource re-finding, defining communities of interest, ownership identification, identification of resource qualities, and understanding the content of web resources (Golder & Huberman, 2006), to name just a few. In general, tags that were created by others can be viewed as serving two main purposes, 1) promoting understanding of the associated set of web resources, and 2) facilitating navigation of the collection of web resources. At each step of the navigation process, a set of tag serves to describe the set of associated resources, but it also serves as starting points for further navigation.