WWW 2006, Edinburgh

Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop

Call for Paper and Participation

November 15, 2005

Contact: [frank AT rawsugar DOT com]

!!!New: See Workshop schedule!!!

See important dates below.

Chairs:

Frank Smadja, RawSugar.

Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo Research.

Scott Golder, HP Labs.

Program Committee:

Eytan Adar, University of Washington.

Michael Cafarella, University of Washington

Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research

Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research

Jonathan Feinberg, IBM Research, Cambridge

Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

R. Guha, Google

Yoelle Maarek, IBM Research, Haifa Israel.

Vova Soroka, IBM Research, Haifa Israel

Background

There has recently there been a great surge of interest in collaborative tagging as a means of facilitating knowledge sharing in social computing. Collaborative tagging refers to the process in which a community of users adds meta-information in the form of keywords or tags to Web content such as web pages, links, photographs and audio files on a centralized web server.

While collaborative tagging is only starting to be researched in the research community, it seems to address a real need on the Web as demonstrated by the growing popularity of tagging and annotation sites (see del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, RawSugar, Shadows, etc.); the most popular sites already have a combined user base of several millions. The philosophy of what is called Web 2.0, the social Web or also the two-way Web is that users can and should be content creators as well as consumers and it suggests that there is a great deal of untapped potential for tagging to improve how web content is organized, navigated and experienced. Yet it is not yet clear how it will evolve and how it will scale, when, if at all, its usage base will go beyond early adopters. There are many open questions about what tagging can and cannot do, especially for a larger, mainstream web community and we would like to explore that in our workshop.

Goal and Topics of Interests

The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners together in order to explore both the social and technical issues and challenges involved in Web tagging. We plan to address not only the current state of collaborative tagging, and understand its attractiveness to early adopters but also discuss its future.

Topics of interest for the workshop include:

• Semantics and Vocabulary: How can collaborative tagging be used in the creation of ontologies and the semantic web? What are tagging’s benefits and limitations in this domain? How can meaning be faithfully preserved when disparate tag sets are integrated? Is there a place in tagging for controlled vocabulary?  Is it necessary to match synonymous tags, and if so, how can this be accomplished technically?  Are there other mechanisms that can extend tagging to provide some of the capabilities of hierarchies without the drawbacks?
• Measurement: What is the structure of tagspace?  What behavioral patterns do users display when tagging, and how can the entire space of objects and tags be understood and visualized?
• Standardization efforts: Although very little of this has been done currently, current services are somehow interoperable through the use of RSS or Atom feeds. What could be the benefits of tagging standards and what would they be?
• Scalable architecture for tagging: What will happen when millions of users will tag, how about hundreds of millions? What kind of architecture can deal with billions of objects? Can current tagging concepts be applied to such scales?
• Multimedia: Are there special considerations for tagging multimedia such as photos, videos and audio? Yahoo photos now already has over two billion photographs.
• Search and Navigation: How can tagging improve internet search? How are tags used as a mechanism for navigation and discovery of content?
• Discovery paradigms: How to search, browse a tagged universe? What is the use of faceted search, people search, etc.?
• Blogging: What is the relationship between tagging and blogging?  How do these two methods of adding personalized organization to web content affect how that content is found, navigated, used and interpreted by others?
• Interfaces: Using boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT on sets of tags rapidly grows complex and confusing, especially for nontechnical users. How can good interface design simplify and clarify these complex operations?

Workshop Presenter Selection Process:

We will solicit submissions to present work to the workshop, and submissions will be evaluated by the organizing committee.

Because collaborative tagging on the web is relatively young and has received relatively little scholarly attention, we encourage contributions from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, including computer science and engineering, sociology, anthropology and linguistics, and communications and library science.

Despite the novelty of collaborative tagging, we seek contributions with demonstrable results, as well as purely theoretical pieces. These results may consist of designs and prototypes for future tagging systems, quantitative or qualitative analyses of existing systems, or solutions for technical challenges facing tagging. Though speculative or theoretical contributions will be considered, we will require that they be well-grounded in previous research or practice.

How to submit a paper/proposal for the workshop:
For research in progress work, each candidate will email to [frank AT rawsugar DOT com] in PDF format:

• A short bio (less than one half page)
• A position paper or extended abstract (less than 5 pages) including references and figures.
  
  

For system presentations/demos, each candidate will email to [frank AT rawsugar DOT com] in PDF format:

• A short bio (less than one half page)
• A description of the system to be demoed (less than 3 pages)
• If available, a demo of the system in some format.

Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee and invitations to present will be sent accordingly. Authors of accepted submissions will be requested to submit a longer version for inclusion in the Working Notes to be distributed during the workshop.

Format:

Papers should be emailed to [frank AT rawsugar DOT com] preferably in PDF format and alternatively in HTML or MS Word.

Papers should be formatted according to the standard ACM templates available at http://www2006.org/cfp/submissions.php, for example the MS Word template is in http://www2006.org/cfp/www2006-submission.doc; and then converted to pdf. Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) can be used to export standard formats to PDF.

Important Dates:

Individual workshop submissions deadline: 29 January 2006

Acceptance notifications to authors of workshop papers: 1 February 2006

Final workshop program available: 1st March 2006

Workshop date: Monday May 22, 2006