Retrieval effectiveness of tagging systems
Isabella Peters, Laura Schumann, Jens Terliesner, Wolfgang G. Stock · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2011
Abstract Social tagging is a widespread activity for indexing user‐generated content on Web services. This paper summarizes research on folksonomies and their retrieval effectiveness. A TREC‐like retrieval test was conducted with tags and resources from the social bookmarking system delicious, which resulted in recall and precision values for tag‐only searches. Moreover, several experimental tag‐based databases (i.e., power tags, Luhn‐tags) have been tested regarding their retrieval effectiveness. Test results show that folksonomies work best with short queries although recall values are high and precision values are low. Here, a search function “power tags only” greatly enhances precision values.