Harnessing collective intelligence in social tagging using Delicious

A new collaborative approach in information organization and sharing has recently arisen, known as collaborative tagging or social indexing. A key element of collaborative tagging is the concept of collective intelligence (CI), which is a shared intelligence among all participants. This research investigates the phenomenon of social tagging in the context of CI with the aim to serve as a stepping‐stone towards the mining of truly valuable social tags for web resources. This study focuses on assessing and evaluating the degree of CI embedded in social tagging over time in terms of two‐parameter values, number of participants, and top frequency ranking window. Five different metrics were adopted and utilized for assessing the similarity between ranking lists: overlapList, overlapRank, Footrule, Fagin's measure, and the Inverse Rank measure. The result of this study demonstrates that a substantial degree of CI is most likely to be achieved when somewhere between the first 200 and 400 people have participated in tagging, and that a target degree of CI can be projected by controlling the two factors along with the selection of a similarity metric. The study also tests some experimental conditions for detecting social tags with high CI degree. The results of this study can be applicable to the study of filtering social tags based on CI; filtered social tags may be utilized for the metadata creation of tagged resources and possibly for the retrieval of tagged resources.