Tagging society through the web and crawling big data for social uses : method and implications
Juan D. Borrero, Estrella Gualda · 2012
Tags, keywords freely chosen by users for annotating resources, offer a new way for organizing and retrieving web resources that closely reflect the users’ interests and also automatically generate folksonomies. Social tagging systems have gained increasing popularity as a method of annotating and categorizing a wide range of different web resources. They also attract researchers in social sciences because they offer a huge quantity of user-generated annotations that reveal the interests of millions of people. The growing number of scientific publications concerning this issue on one hand, and the development of real social tagging systems on the other, such as social networks (Twitter), social bookmarking applications (Delicious), sharing systems (Flickr), and also in the e-commerce field (Amazon), confirm this tendence. The social aspects of these systems derive from the fact that the resources are tagged by the community, a feature known as collaborative tagging, which provides important metadata for investigators and others practitioners.