Understanding the Efficiency of Social Tagging Systems Using Information Theory

Abstract

Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved tagging vocabulary in describing any underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional categorization problem with ontologies? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for encoding navigation paths to information sources.