Folksonomy as a Complex Network

TL;DR

This paper analyzes folksonomy as a complex network, revealing it exhibits small-world and scale-free properties, but notes that current statistics only capture a static snapshot of its evolving nature.

Contribution

It provides a network-based analysis of folksonomy, highlighting its structural properties and emphasizing the dynamic, evolving aspect of folksonomy data.

Findings

Folksonomy networks display small-world properties.

Folksonomy networks are scale-free.

Current statistics only capture static snapshots of evolving folksonomy.

Abstract

Folksonomy is an emerging technology that works to classify the information over WWW through tagging the bookmarks, photos or other web-based contents. It is understood to be organized by every user while not limited to the authors of the contents and the professional editors. This study surveyed the folksonomy as a complex network. The result indicates that the network, which is composed of the tags from the folksonomy, displays both properties of small world and scale-free. However, the statistics only shows a local and static slice of the vast body of folksonomy which is still evolving.