Article,
Semiotic dynamics and collaborative tagging
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (5): 1461-1464 (2007)
Abstract
co-occurring with the selected one, we find a heavy-tailed behavior which is the mark of human activity8,9 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 fundamental multiplicative character closely related to the idea that users are exposed to each other's tagging activity 10,11,12; (ii) a notion of
memory - or aging of resources - in the form of a heavy-tailed access to the past state of the system. Remarkably, our simple modelling is able to account quantitatively for the measured frequency-rank properties of tag association, with a surprisingly high accuracy. This is a clear indication that collaborative tagging is able to recruit the ncoordinated actions of web users to create a predictable
and coherent semiotic dynamics at the emergent level.
