Authors vs. readers: a comparative study of document metadata and content in the www

  • Authors:

  • Michael G. Noll;Christoph Meinel

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Potsdam;University of Potsdam

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Document engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of unstructured keywords to shared content. The recent practical success of web services with such a tagging component like Flickr or del.icio.us has provided a plethora of user-supplied metadata about web content for everyone to leverage. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of metadata and information provided by the authors and publishers of web documents compared with metadata supplied by end users for the same content. Our study is based on a random sample of 100,000 web documents from the Open Directory, for which we examined the original documents from the World Wide Web in addition to data retrieved from the social bookmarking service del.icio.us, the content rating system ICRA, and the search engine Google. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare user tags with the metadata and actual content of documents in the WWW on a larger scale and to integrate document popularity information in the observations. The data set of our experiments is freely available for research.