Dresden 2006 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AKSOE: Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AKSOE 10: Poster Session (posters are expected to be displayed the full day 8:30-18:00)

AKSOE 10.64: Poster

Mittwoch, 29. März 2006, 16:00–18:00, P2

Collaborative Tagging and Semiotic Dynamics — •Ciro Cattuto^1,2, Vittorio Loreto², and Luciano Pietronero² — ¹Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche No-dqEnrico Fermi”, Compendio Viminale, 00184 Roma, Italy — ²Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita’ di Roma No-dqLa Sapienza’No-dq, P.le A. Moro, 2, 00185 Roma, Italy

A new paradigm has been quickly gaining ground on the WWW: Collaborative Tagging. In web applications like Del.icio.us, Flickr, Connotea, users manage their personal collection of online resources by enriching them with semantically meaningful information in the form of freely chosen tags. Despite the anarchic nature of users’ behavior, the global dynamics of these systems leads to a self-organised categorization (No-dqfolksonomyNo-dq) of a large and evolving body of online resources. Here we collect data from a popular online system and select a semantic context by extracting all the resources associated with a given tag. On studying the distribution of tags co-occurring with the selected one, we find a heavy-tailed behavior and observe properties that point to an emergent hierarchy of tags. We introduce a stochastic model embodying two main aspects of collaborative tagging: (i) a multiplicative character related to the exposure of users to each other’s activity; (ii) a notion of long-term memory. Remarkably, our model is able to account quantitatively for the measured properties of tag association. This is a clear indication that collaborative tagging is able to recruit the uncoordinated actions of web users to create a coherent and predictable semiotic dynamics at the emergent level.