Collaborative Creation of Communal Hierarchical Taxonomies in Social Tagging Systems

Collaborative tagging systems---systems where many casual users annotate objects with free-form strings (tags) of their choosing---have recently emerged as a powerful way to label and organize large collections of data. During our recent investigation into these types of systems, we discovered a simple but remarkably effective algorithm for converting a large corpus of tags annotating objects in a tagging system into a navigable hierarchical taxonomy of tags. We first discuss the algorithm and then present a preliminary model to explain why it is so effective in these types of systems.

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