ED-Media 2008, Vienna

1. Inherit Your Tags
Integration of collaborative tagging
and tag proposal into knowledge spaces
Birger Kühnel
Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Computers and Society
University of Paderborn, Germany
July 2nd 2008, ED-MEDIA 2008, Vienna

2. Overview
1. Introduction
2. Tagging in Knowledge Spaces
3. Implementation
4. Benefits & Conclusions
Inherit Your Tags | Birger Kühnel | ED-MEDIA 2008 | 2

3. Motivation
”The beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive
process without adding much cognitive cost.“ 2
Search
Find users
Tag proposals Aggregation
Tagging is popular
(28% of all Americans tag) 1
Relations
Own Tags
Clusters Tag mashes
1 - Pew Internet Life Project: Report on Tagging 2006 http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/201/report_display.asp
2 - Rashmi Sinha, Researcher & Consultant, Uzanto, from: A cognitive analysis of tagging Inherit Your Tags | Birger Kühnel | ED-MEDIA 2008 | 3

4. Tagging
• Widely accepted tripartite model Resources Tags Users
t2, t4, t5
- Connection between users and resources via tags t1, t3
5, t6
t1, t
• Pivoting among users and resources using tags t1, t3
gives access to resources in a system t1, t2, t3
t2,
• Based on an user vocabulary
t4,
t7
3, t6
t2, t
• Taxonomy for tagging systems according
to factors like:
- Object types, source of material, tagging rights, tagging support
• Tagging-systems are mostly connected
with other techniques of knowledge organization
Inherit Your Tags | Birger Kühnel | ED-MEDIA 2008 | 4

5. Knowledge Spaces
• Concept for coactive working and learning in teams
• Allows structuring various resources / objects in in areas, also called rooms
• Rooms are equipped with detailed rights management
• User-centered self-organisation
• Realized in the open-sTeam system, which provides the technical infrastructure
collections
documents
connections
objects
areas / rooms
Inherit Your Tags | Birger Kühnel | ED-MEDIA 2008 | 5

6. 2. Tagging in Knowledge Spaces
• Actual conditions
- Tagging gains more and more in importance
- Functions mainly focused on categorizing homogeneous web content like images or videos
- Virtual knowledge spaces allow structuring various kinds of resources in areas
• Goal
- Enhancement of tagging by using the
existing structure of virtual knowledge
spaces to improve tagging of ressources
- Derive an inheritance structure for tags and
concept to generate tag proposals
- Improved self-descriptiveness of resources,
that reflects the structure of knowledge spaces
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7. Objects in knowledge spaces
• Objects have varying qualities in presenting and structuring content
• The dimension of use strongly depends on the object type
• Tags assigned to an object may have a descriptive function for other objects
Object types tag benefits
User describe
Group describe
Room / Area content
Collection content
Document semantics
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8. Inheritance of tags to environment
and tag proposal to new documents
Inheritance to
environment Tag proposal
to new document
User
Virtual Knowledge Space
Documents in the
virtual knowledge
space
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9. Inheritance of tags for users and groups
Document
A* B C
D* E*
D*
F
group
A D group
F BC
....
Tag proposal
Users, that on joining the group
E F* joined the group
A D
Environment
E
Group
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10. 3. Implementation
• Implementation uses the open-sTeam server (www.open-steam.org)
and the corresponding client application "Medi@rena Composer"
Inherit Your Tags | Birger Kühnel | ED-MEDIA 2008 | 10

11. General tag view
• Four Tag sets (A1)
• Tag Cloud (A2)
• Tag List (A3)
• Tags of selected object (A4, A6)
• Tag proposal (A5)
Inherit Your Tags | Birger Kühnel | ED-MEDIA 2008 | 11

12. More detailed view of selected tag
• Objects with current tag (B1)
• Marked object (B2)
• List of related tags (B3)
Inherit Your Tags | Birger Kühnel | ED-MEDIA 2008 | 12

13. 4. Benefits & Conclusions
• The described tagging process supports the structure of the knowledge space.
• Tags allow easy access to rooms
• An improved self descriptivism of objects
• Tag proposal derived from the environment tends
to stabilize the vocabulary in tagging systems to a
community supported vocabulary over time
• By using inheritance in combination with tag proposals,
we provide an easier, more efficient way to encourage users to tag their objects
‣ Organizing rooms according to assigned tags, so that objects with a semantic relation
are presented closer together in a 2-dimensional visualization
‣ Inform user about the possibility, that an object could also be of interest for a different
room or a different group he belongs to
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Dipl.-Inform. Birger Kühnel inh
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birger@uni-paderborn.de tag t you
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http://iug.upb.de/birger
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Heinz Nixdorf Institute ive
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Computers and Society pa of ity
http://www.open-steam.org University of Paderborn
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Fürstenallee 11
http://iug.uni-paderborn.de 33102 Paderborn
Germany
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