Collective Intelligence in Collaborative Tagging System

Abstract

Recently, a new form of organizing, sharing and finding information, named tagging, has gained importance because its results are the product of the combined efforts of the actual users’ opinions of the information. In this paper, we explore the conceptual model of the del.icio.us tagging system in order to investigate the degree to which the tagging system’s conceptual model reflects the human conceptual knowledge structure at both the population level and the individual level. We use datasets extracted from the del.icio.us system from 2003 to 2007 to obtain the strength of connection among tags, and compare that with data for the association of the same concepts by actual human beings. The results show that, overall, the conceptual model for the del.icio.us tagging system captures human’s notion of concept similarity. Several potential applications are mentioned.