Tag clouds revisited

  • Authors:

  • Dimitrios Skoutas;Mohammad Alrifai

  • Affiliations:

  • L3S Research Center, Hanover, Germany;L3S Research Center, Hanover, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Tagging has become a very common feature in Web 2.0 applications, providing a simple and effective way for users to freely annotate resources to facilitate their discovery and management. Subsequently, tag clouds have become popular as a summarized representation of a collection of tagged resources. A tag cloud is typically a visualization of the top-k most frequent tags in the underlying collection. In this paper, we revisit tag clouds, to examine whether frequency is the most suitable criterion for tag ranking. We propose alternative tag ranking strategies, based on methods for random walk on graphs, diversification,and rank aggregation. To enable the comparison of different tag selection and ranking methods, we propose a set of evaluation metrics that consider the use of tag clouds for search, navigation and recommendations. We apply these tag ranking methods and evaluation metrics to empirically compare alternative tag clouds in a dataset obtained from Flickr, comprising 488,112 tagged photos organized in 451 groups, and 112,514 distinct tags.