Abstract

Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved vocabulary in describing any underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional categorization problem with ontologies? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for navigation to information sources. We show that over time, del.icio.us is becoming harder and harder to navigate and provide an evaluation metric, namely entropy, that can be used to evaluate and drive system design choices.

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