My paper
“Authors vs. Readers: A Comparative Study of Document Metadata and Content in the WWW” has been accepted for publication at this year’s
ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, which will be held at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada from August 28 - 31, 2007.
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Abstract
Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of unstructured keywords to shared content. The recent practical success of web services with such a tagging component like
Flickr or
del.icio.us has provided a plethora of user-supplied metadata about web content for everyone to leverage.
In this paper, we conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of metadata and information provided by the authors and publishers of web documents compared with metadata supplied by end users for the same content. Our study is based on a random sample of 100,000 web documents from the
Open Directory, for which we examined the original documents from the World Wide Web in addition to data retrieved from the social bookmarking service
del.icio.us, the content rating system
ICRA, and the search engine
Google. The data set of our experiments, called
DMOZ100k06, is
freely available for other research. We hope that the results of our study give researchers valuable insights for building and improving systems for document engineering, retrieval, and classification in the World Wide Web today.
Information sources used for building the DMOZ100K06 data set.
Note: I used my custom
del.icio.us Python API for retrieving the relevant data from
del.icio.us.
Paper
You can download the paper as a PDF document:
Presentation
My talk given at the DocEng 2007 conference is available for
download (PDF).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank
Alexandre Dulaunoy for his help with mirroring the HTML documents in the data set, and his comments while I was preparing the paper. Again, it’s been greatly appreciated, Alex!
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