Poster

Visualizing tag aging and decay

Alla Zollers, Jackson Fox

Tag clouds are visualization tools utilized in social tagging systems to help users retrieve tagged resources as well as recognize relationships among tags. Currently tag clouds use varying font sizes to visually differentiate between frequency of tag use, with the most frequent tag being displayed in a large font. Although tag clouds are extremely useful, they do not adequately address problems related to tag aging. The flexibility of tagging systems allows users to rapidly adopt new terms and engage in extremely dynamic tagging practices, yet tag clouds are not able to represent agile shifts in tagging patterns. This poster will first present an overview of the problems related to tag aging such as semantic drift, changes in tagging patterns, and linguistic shifts, as well as present alternative tag cloud visualizations that specifically incorporate concepts of tag aging and decay.