Does Tagging Indicate Knowledge Diffusion? An Exploratory Case Study

Does Tagging Indicate Knowledge Diffusion? An Exploratory Case Study
Anwar Us Saeed, Muhammad Tanvir Afzal, Atif Latif and Alexander Stocker

Abstract: The high potential of knowledge to create economies of
scale attracted the interest towards understanding the
dynamics of its diffusion. The new developments in the
collaborative and participatory role of web emerges new
knowledge structures driving the need towards web based
indicators for studying the diffusion of knowledge. We
present the results of an exploratory case-study
investigating the tagging and citing practices for the
WWW `06 conference papers. We observed two important
patterns: (1) Papers which got heavily tagged in all three
applications Delicious, Citeulike and Bibsonomy
(average total tags > 6) generally achieved a high
number of citations. We also observed that most of the
tags were from 2006 and most of the citations were from
2007. This indicated that tags may hold the potential of
foretelling the future volume of regenerative diffusion of
research. (2) Terms appearing in tag-clouds of highly
tagged papers in 2006 reappear frequently in the titles of
respective citing papers in 2007. This shows that tag
clouds may have the potential of forecasting the context
of diffusion as well. It furthermore indicates that the users
tag the papers with multiple tags according to their
specific contexts of use as well as content of that
knowledge artifact based on these patterns we propose
that tags may be used as a supplementary indicator to
model the diffusion of knowledge.

Zitat: Us Saaed, Anwar; Afzal, Muhammad Tanvir; Latif, Atif; Stocker, Alexander, Does Tagging Indicate Knowledge Diffusion? An Exploratory Case Study, to appear in Proceedings of the ICCIT 08 – International Conference on Convergence and hybrid Information Technology, Busan, Korea, 2008.

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