Collaborative editing of micro-tags

Abstract

This paper introduces the InSight system, which was designed to explore two new concepts in social tagging. In this system, we introduce the concept of community-editable tags, a methodology that allows a community of users to edit, modify and delete tags of each other. The goal is to improve the quality of tags, and to reduce the proliferation of incorrect or incomplete tags often found in social networking systems. We also explore the concept of "micro-tagging," which has begun to appear in web-based applications. In "micro-tagging," the user attaches a tag to a subset of large media, such as a segment in a video or a region of an image. InSight allows users to create and edit video micro-tags. Users can mark specific time intervals within a video, and specific spatial locations within video frames, and these tags can be edited by subsequent users. We also present an empirical study which demonstrates an improvement in factual tag quality when the community of users is allowed to edit and delete each others' tags. These results provide a first step in demonstrating how refining tags would make them more valuable for search.