Enhancing the Navigability of Social Tagging Systems with Tag Taxonomies

Tagging introduces an intuitive and easy method to organize resources in information systems. Although tags exhibit useful properties for e.g. personal organization of information, recent research has shown that the navigability of social tagging systems leaves much to be desired. When browsing social tagging systems users often have to navigate through huge lists of potential results before arriving at the desired resource. Thus, from a user point of view tagging systems are typically hard to navigate. To overcome this issue, we present in this paper a novel approach to supporting navigation in social tagging systems. We introduce tag-resource taxonomies that aim to support efficient navigation of tagging systems. To that end, we introduce an algorithm for the generation of these hierarchical structures. We evaluate the proposed algorithm and hierarchies from a theoretical, semantic and empirical point of view. With these evaluations we are able to show the high performance and usefulness of the proposed hierarchies.