Main conference presentation

Exploratory search and folksonomy: Exploration paths in social tagging systems

Tingting Jiang

Saturday April 12 2008, 11:30 - 12:15PM

Exploratory search is triggered by the complexity of real world: we lack the knowledge or contextual awareness to formulate queries or navigate complex information spaces, the search task requires exploration, or system indexing of information is insufficient. The integration of searching and browsing is believed a necessity in this process. Today’s exploratory search systems employ different information organization schemes to facilitate searching and browsing, which are hierarchical classes, faceted categories, and clusters. In social tagging systems, where information seeking is exploratory in nature, we see a fourth one - folksonomy that aggregates user-generated tags assigning to resources also provided by them. In this paper, we study the four structures comparatively and create a grid summarizing their pros and cons in supporting exploratory search. Incompactness of folksonomy, usually considered as a defect, however enables more exploration possibilities - being aware, monitoring, searching and browsing around the three basic elements of tagging systems, which is shaped into our exploration framework for social environments.