USER GENERATED INFORMATIONTO RESOURCE DESCRIPTIONSUE YEON SYN
syn@cua.edu
SCHOOL OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCECATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICAUSERS

Information ConsumertoInformation Creator

2

USER GENERATED INFORMATION• Postings• Comments• Reviews• Tags• Ratings• Likes/Dislikes

Tags are: One word description
 Easy to create
 Mass agreement
 No control
 No structure

3

USE OF USER TAGS
• Library Community• The Steve.Museum project• Library of Congress Photos on Flickr project• Delicious and LibraryThing to ILS• Research• Tags can be used as index (Hotho et al., 2006;Yanbe et al., 2007)• Tags provide additional information (Noll andMeinel, 2007)• Basic level classification (Golder and Huberman,2005)• The more tags, the better cluster concepts(Wisdom of the Crowd) (Mika, 2007; Quintarelli,2005)
4

QUALITY• A lot of tag noise• Misspelled terms, compound terms, single and pluralforms, personal tags, idiosyncratic tags, etc.

• Still has social shared meanings as well as
personal meanings (Guy and Tonkin, 2006)• Reduce the semantic gap between
professional discourse and popular language ofmuseum visitors (The Steve.Museum project)• Lower cost with greater scalability (Macgregorand McCulloch, 2006)
5

CONTROLLED VOCABULARY
VS. USER TAGS• Survival – Juvenile fiction• Television programs – Juvenile fiction• Interpersonal relations – Juvenilefiction• Contests – Juvenile fiction• Survival – Fiction• Television programs – Fiction• Interpersonal relations – Fiction• Contests – Fiction• Science fiction••••••••••••••••••••••

young adultsurvival
dystopiascience fiction
post-apocalyptic
fantasyadventurefictionfuturecompetition
futuristic
reality tv
seriesromancefriendship
love
novel
violence
suspense
readdeath….
Image credits: Amazon.com;

6

USER TAGS AND CONTROLLEDVOCABULARY• 61% of tags match with LCSH (Yi and Chan, 2009)• 70% of user tags matched AAT (Trant, 2009)

7

METADATA VS. USER TAGS

• Title: Aviator• Creator: R.B. Kitai (United States,Ohio, Chagrin Falls, 1932-10-29 –2007-10-21)• Created: 1971
• Medium: Lithograph withphotograph collages
Image source: http://tagger.steve.museum/steve/object/56284?offset=••
••••
••••
•••
•
••
•
•

airplaneamericanaviatorcollagecreepygoggleshatletters
lithographlithography
photo
photographpilot
smiling
text
unitedstates
word
…..
8

WHAT DO USERS DESCRIBE?
Self-reference,
0.70%

N/A, 2.45%

Usage, 1.66%
Type, 21.23%

Location/Source,0.23%
Subject, 60.38%
Creator, 7.72%

Time, 5.62%
9

WHAT DO USERS DESCRIBE?
54.5
4

Mean Ratings

3.5
32.5

Filtered tags
INFOMINE

2ODP

1.5
10.5
0

Topical Terms

GeneralCategory

Resource Type

Types of Term

OthersN/A10

DESCRIBING RESOURCES
Shakespeare
Authorship
ObjectCharacter/Role

Image credits:
Amazon.com; Wikipedia; IMDB

Subject

11

DESCRIBING RESOURCES
Romeo and Juliet

Object/Recreation

Subject/
Theme

Performance/
Activity(Realization)

Image credits:
Amazon.com; Wikipedia; IMDB

12DESCRIBING SECONDARY RESOURCES• E.g. Critics of Romeo and Juliet, Plays of
Shakespeare, Civil War and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Poem on Romeo and Juliet• Relationship with original work/object• Projection• Originality• Its own description• Creator, Date, Media, etc.

13Time period

Geographicalplace

Event/Activity

Concept/Theme

Organization

PersonObject/Thing

Work title

Percent

SUBJECT ATTRIBUTE DISTRIBUTION
2520

15105014

KEY ASPECTS OF
USER GENERATED INFORMATION• User generated information is topic-related.
• User generated information is based on the natureof resources.
• User generated information may include personalinterpretation.
• User generated information provides additionaldescription to expert description.
• Use generated information relates original andsecondary resources.

15

USER GENERATED INFORMATION TORESOURCE DESCRIPTION• Describing topics• Describing multiple aspects of resource• Enriching metadata as resource description• In describing secondary resources• Identifying the description attributes• Facets

16

THANK YOU!

Questions??

17