ArticleRead (6): The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful?

The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful? By James Sinclair and Michael Cardew-Hall ,Journal of Information Science 2008 34: 15-29

With the assumption of folksonomy systems affecting user perceptions and patterns, it is interesting to see what empirically can be found from a user interface point to see how tag cloud impact users in information exploration. Sinclair and Cardew-Hall in this paper clearly conclude their findings in small-scale enterprise context, which supports arguments of Mathes (2004) and Brooks & Montanex (2006), that the usability of tag cloud is a social navigation aid tool when broad, general or vague information exploration is taken up. Increasingly, evidences from empirical survey support the function of tagging for broad categorization. [e.g. Noll and Meinel, 2007]

A proper appreciation of this research with which the need to evaluate Tag Cloud in its usability is asserted in its visual summary design, and its ability to serve for non-specific information discovery. Such results are also given weights to a substantial literature reviews of many pro-and-con characteristics of tag clouds. Here, we try to summarize both ends in usability and sociability analysis in the table below.


A very interesting section of this article is that: only 2 out of 89 participants with high level computer background in their experiment are familiar with the tagging mechanism. This percentage is surprisingly low while comparing to the overview that almost one third of online American users have used tagging mechanisms. Out of most curiosity is that since this study is a research on user patterns and perception, there is a missing data analysis to undertake. While the study has concluded that the cost of a query is reduced in the tag cloud scenario (compared with more typing efforts in search box), should the mean tags tagged per article of each participant need to be considered as one of the factors in the cost analysis? Indeed, this remains a question to explore.

ArticleRead (5): Clustering versus Faceted Categories for Information Exploration

Clustering versus faceted categories for information exploration, By MA Hearst, in Communications of the ACM, Volume 49 , Issue 4 (April 2006)

Based on usability perspective, this paper reveals the complex of two grouping mechanisms: clustering and faceted classification.

Traditional top-down and predefined methods like clustering approaches have benefits in their algorithms and automaticabilities while in some bottom up user-oriented methods, the hierarchical faceted categories (HFC) as the author has proposed in particular, is in favour of locating user interest through some manual setting of category hierarchies which are associated with multiple facets.

This paper first discusses some advantages and disadvantage of clustering. Simple clustering algorithms for designers and clarifying vague queries for users by returning the dominant themes as results are main reasons lead designers to take the clustering approach. However, empirical evidence does not support these usabilities. Second, the author explains why clustering method is not a useful and effective tool in information exploration and proposes the hierarchical faceted categories (HFC) approach with an introduction to their prototype: The Flamenco Open Source faceted classification project.

Table 1 shows the comparision of clustering and faceted classification