EXPLORING CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION

Three empirical studies on characteristics of social classification are reported in this paper. The first study compared social tags with controlled vocabularies and title-based automatic indexing and found little overlaps among the three indexing methods. The second study investigated how well tags could be categorized to improve effectiveness of searching and browsing. The third study explored factors and radios that had the most significant impact on tag convergence. Finding of the three studies will help to identify characteristics of those tagging terms that are content-rich and that can be used to increase effectiveness of tagging, searching and browsing.