i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

19 October 2009

An important trend in or feature of many information-intensive applications and services is to support the creation and aggregation of metadata, preference information or other content from users or customers.  This has been described as  user-generated content, tagging, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, folksonomy,... and so on.   Such activity is partly self-serving because it enhances the quality of future experiences for the contributors, as when people rate restaurants, hotels, photos, or other service establishments or information sources and subsequently choose only highly-rated ones.  But it is also social, and often an act of generosity or altruism because many people contribute far more information or effort than pure self-interest would justify.  Social/distributed categorization methods are increasingly being used in enterprise or institutional contexts, and a key question is the extent to which "tag convergence" yields useful semantics