Computing the Tag Genome

Tags help users understand a rich information space, by showing them specific text annotations for each item in the space and enabling them to search by these annotations. Often, however, users may wish to move from one item to other items that are similar overall, but that differ in key characteristics. For example, a user who loves Pulp Fiction might want to see a similar movie, but might be in a mood for a less “dark” movie. In separate work we introduce Movie Tuner, a novel interface that supports navigation from one item to nearby items along dimensions represented by tags. In the present paper we describe a data structure called the tag genome that enables this form of navigation. The tag genome encodes each item’s relationship to a common set of tags by applying machine learning algorithms to usercontributed content. ACM Classification