Structured versus unstructured tagging: a case study
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520810914016 |
| Date | 26 September 2008 |
| Pages | 635-647 |
| Published date | 26 September 2008 |
| Author | Judit Bar‐Ilan,Snunith Shoham,Asher Idan,Yitzchak Miller,Aviv Shachak |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Structured versus unstructured
tagging: a case study
Judit Bar-Ilan, Snunith Shoham, Asher Idan and Yitzchak Miller
Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University,
Ramat-Gan, Israel, and
Aviv Shachak
Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – This paper seeks to describe and discuss a tagging experiment involving images related
to Israeli and Jewish cultural heritage. The aim of this experiment was to compare freely assigned tags
with values (free text) assigned to predefined metadata elements.
Design/methodology/approach – Two groups of participants were asked to provide tags for 12
images. The first group of participants was asked to assign descriptive tags to the images without
guidance (unstructured tagging), while the second group was asked to provide free-text values to
predefined metadata elements (structured tagging).
Findings – The results show that on the one hand structured tagging provides guidance to the users,
but on the other hand different interpretations of the meaning of the elements may worsen the tagging
quality instead of improving it. In addition, unstructured tagging allows for a wider range of tags.
Research limitations/implications – The recommendation is to experiment with a system where
the users provide both the tags and the context of these tags.
Originality/value – Unstructured tagging has become highly popular on the web, thus it is
important to evaluate its merits and shortcomings compared to more conventional methods.
Keywords – National cultures, Inter-computerlinks, Internet, Document imageprocessing,
Identification,Israel
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Image tagging on the web has recently become extremely popular (see, for example, the
popular photo sharing and tagging service, Flickr (http://flickr.com/) or the photo
tagging application at Facebook (www.facebook.com)). Although we do not challeng e
the saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” currently the best method to
retrieve pictures is based on textual descriptions. Image processing and recognition are
very active research fields, but there are no well-developed commercial systems that
retrieve images based on image recognition. Yahoo! and Google image searches are
both based on the text near the ,img.tag in the html files.
The popular image tagging systems like Flickr do not impose any restrictions or
structure on the tags users assign to pictures (although some systems, like delicio.us
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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The authors thank the students of the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University
who participated in the experiment. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the
Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference at
Edinburgh, Scotland on 22 May 2006.
Structured vs
unstructured
tagging
635
Refereed article received
1 February 2008
Approved for publication
15 March 2008
Online Information Review
Vol. 32 No. 5, 2008
pp. 635-647
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520810914016
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