Is Tagging Effective? - Overlapping Ratios with Other Metadata Fields

The potential advantages of tagging have been addressed in numerous literatures, however still the effectiveness of tagging in information retrieval has not confirmed yet along with continuous intensive debates between advocates of new tagging systems versus traditional controlled vocabulary metadata. Despite all the potential advantages of tagging, the overlapping ratios between tags and the words used in other metadata fields, such as title and description, are significant. In this study, with the data from Youtube.com videos, the degree of overlapping is examined among the fields of title, description and tag, with additional questions about tagging, such as changes in numbers of words in each metadata field over time and the difference between web site promotion videos and non-promotion videos. The findings include 1) the number of words in each metadata fields have increased over time; 2) web site promotional videos have more words in each metadata fields than non-promotional videos; 3) more than 50% of words are shared among metadata fields including the tag field; 4) as much as 25% of the videos have the exactly same words repeated among the metadata fields. More similar studies with data from other social tagging sites are suggested to verify these findings.