Folksonomy and Exploratory Search

Tingring Jiang & Dr Sherry Koshman
School of Information Sciences - University of Pittsburgh
3rd PhD student at University of Pittsburgh.
The material here is fairly simple overview of tagging systems. She compares and contrasts the various search behaviors with the activies in the social tagging systems.

Exploratory search and social tagging systems
Information architectures in exploratory search systems
Information seeking modes in social tagging systems

Exploratory search is the look for uncertainties in information need and information space. Looking with out a goal. More an attempt to understand the informaiton space. Typical activities are searching in a cognitive way, or browsing in a perceptual way. So searching is "teleportation" and browsing is "berry picking" in my terms.

Investigation into information seeking within social tagging systesm is typically exploratory. People are not looking up specific peices of information, they are instead trying to understand the system and how it will grow - trends.
She is taking a classic information sciences approach to folksonomy, finding it to be lacking in heirarchy and overly anarchic.

Four structures
Hierarchical classification
Faceted categorization
Dynamic clusters
Folksonomy

Hierarchical classification characterized by fixed non overlapping systems. Classic taxonomies.

Faceted Categorization characterized by a set of small hierachries that represent conceptual dimensions. Less human investment. Favors recognition over recall, making them easier for the user. This is limited to a fixed collection, unable to search dynamic material. These are similar to our filters in Beta II.

Dynamic clusters are generated based on the material retrieved. They are based on the clustering algorithms. Very automated. This is AQG in Autonomy and is in Beta III.

Folksonomy is characterized as being flat and inclusive. Based on anyone at any time in any language adding terms to the folksonomy. The benefits are inexpensiveness and responsiveness.

She gives a nice overview of the structures in a table. Worth including in our system.

She sees 4 types of behavior in social tagging systems
Browsing
Searching
Being aware
Monitoring

Still have the same 3 main elements: resources, users, tags. She then takes each in turn and shows how they interrelate and the behaviors of each.

This is a overview of tagging systems in general, not focused on using tagging in search or document retrieval.