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TopTagclouds
TagClouds is a visualization of popular tags (see Figure 1). In this visualization, tags are normally ordered alphabetically, with font size representing their popularity. Additional information, such as recency can be illustrated with color lightness. Comparing with tags generated by single users, these popular tags in TagClouds have a higher degree of generality and accuracy. Such visualization facilitates quickly foraging an overall impression of the most popular items, and thus conveys the general interests among a large audience (Viégas & Wattenberg, 2008), (Hearst 2008), (Hearst & Rosner, 2008). TagClouds can be also used for keyword-based search by selecting one or multiple tags as input.
TopLimitations Of Tagclouds
In most online communities, users are allowed to generate tags freely, without any restriction or quality control. This low usage barrier has attracted hundreds of millions users. However, due to the free nature of tagging, some problems are inevitable with these collaborative tags (Li, Bao, Yu, Fei & Su, 2007; Hassan & Herrero, 2006).
Linguistic Problems
Nielsen (2007) and Begelman, Keller and Smadja (2006) discovered educational and cultural background influence people’s understanding of tags, which is one of the reasons for tag inconsistency among different users. With no input restrictions, two general problems are hardly to avoid from the users’ perspective (Wu, Zhang, & Yu, 2006): Synonymy, which is also termed as “inter-indexer inconsistency” by Nielsen (2007), appears when different terms are used to describe the same item. A term with several different meanings brings ambiguity (Mathes, 2008), which may reduce the precision of the retrieval results.