No Bull, No Spin: Comparing Public Tags with other Descriptive User Metadata
User-contributed tags have shown promise as a means of indexing multimedia collections by harnessing the efforts and enthusiasm of online communities. But tags are only one way of creating viable descriptions of multimedia collections. In this talk, I report on a study that takes a close look at the characteristics of public tags by comparing them to other forms of descriptive metadata that users have assigned to an image collection. I also use the study results to formulate design recommendations for tagging tools and to speculate on how photo sharing sites may be used as de facto art and architecture resources.
Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher in Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley Lab. She is currently working on Community Information Management applications and issues associated with personal digital archiving.
Cathy's research falls roughly under the rubric of personal information management and lies in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities. Her interests include digital archiving and long-term retrieval; how people use and share encountered information; how people read, annotate, navigate through, and interact with ebooks and other electronic publications like e-magazines and e-newspapers; and spatial hypertext. She holds provocative views on topics like the Semantic Web and social tagging.