Patent ID: 8402022

Claim:
A method for converging terms within a collaborative tagging environment, the method comprising: under control of one or more processors of one or more computing devices that are configured with processor-executable instructions, receiving, by the one or more processors, terms characterizing an item within the collaborative tagging environment; identifying at least some of the terms as divergent terms at least in part by statistically analyzing the terms to identify frequently-occurring terms and infrequently-occurring terms, wherein the statistical analysis comprises generating a histogram representation of frequently-occurring terms and infrequently-occurring terms to enable at least one user to visualize a distribution and a frequency of candidate terms within the divergent terms, and enabling at least one user to group a plurality of identified candidate terms within the divergent terms for convergence to at least one frequently-occurring term; converging, in response to a user input, the candidate terms within the divergent terms into one of the identified frequently-occurring terms; and at least partly in response to the converging, assigning the one of the identified frequently-occurring terms to the item in lieu of each of the divergent terms to facilitate searching for the item.