Metadata Effectiveness: A Comparison between User-Created Social Tags and Author-Provided Metadata

This paper aims to investigate the additional information value provided by user-created social tags and author-provided metadata as well as their effectiveness in facilitating Web clustering and discovery. We collected a data set of Web pages that includes both social tags from the del.icio.us website and author-provided metadata crawled from the internet. Based on this data set, we first checked the overlap of user-created tags and author-provided metadata with the title and content of the annotated web pages. Then, we experimented on two clustering methods based on tags and author-provided metadata. The results show that both tags and author-provided metadata add valuable information to existing page content and that social tags are more effective than author-created metadata for enhancing web clustering performance either as an independent information source or as links connecting topically related pages.