Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining

2014 Edition
| Editors: Reda Alhajj, Jon Rokne

Tag Clouds

Reference work entry
First Online:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6170-8_126
How to cite

Synonyms

Keyword clouds; Tagclouds; Term clouds

Glossary

Resource

Any kind of web content, e.g., documents, hyperlinks, images, or videos, that is uniquely addressable

Tag

A short string, term, or word that describes an online resource and that is applied by a person

Word Cloud

A visualization method that shows the top N most frequent words of a text document

Definition

A tag cloud is a visualization method that summarizes a set of tags related to a certain resource or a set of resources in a visually appealing manner. Contrary to a word cloud, the tags in the tag cloud are generated by people and refer to resources through links. Usually, a tag cloud shows the topmost N tags of one particular online resource, a set of resources, or the resources of the whole system. A very basic and at the same time very popular approach for tag clouds calculation is an algorithm that sorts the tags by alphabet and indicates the importance of each tag by font size (see Fig. 1). However, today a large...

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References

  1. Bateman S, Gutwin C, Nacenta M (2008) Seeing things in the clouds: the effect of visual features on tag cloud selections. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, HT'08. ACM, New York, pp 193–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379130
  2. Halvey MJ, Keane MT (2007) An assessment of tag presentation techniques. In: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on world wide web, WWW'07. ACM, New York, pp 1313–1314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1242572.1242826
  3. Helic D, Trattner C, Strohmaier M, Andrews K (2011) Are tag clouds useful for navigation? A network-theoretic analysis. Int J Soc Comput Cyber-Phys Syst 1(1): 33–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJSCCPS.2011.043601
  4. Kaser O, Lemire D (2007) Tag-Cloud drawing: algorithms for cloud visualization. In: Proceedings of tagging and metadata for social information organization (WWW 2007). http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0703109
  5. Kuo BYL, Hentrich T, Good BM, Wilkinson MD (2007) Tag clouds for summarizing web search results. In: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on world wide web, WWW'07. ACM, New York, pp 1203–1204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1242572.1242766
  6. Tagclouds (2012) Tagclouds.com. http://www.tagclouds.com. Accessed 08 Aug 2012
  7. TagExplorer (2012) Sandbox from Yahoo! research. http://tagexplorer.sandbox.yahoo.com. Accessed 08 Aug 2012
  8. Trattner C (2012) On the navigability of social tagging systems. Dissertation, Graz University of Technology, Graz, pp 1–240. https://online.tugraz.at/tugonline/wbAbs.showThesis?pThesisNr=46709
  9. Trattner C, Lin Yl, Parra D, Yue Z, Real W, Brusilovsky P (2012) Evaluating tag-based information access in image collections. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference on hypertext and social media, HT'12. ACM, New York, pp 113–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2309996.2310016
  10. Venetis P, Koutrika G, Garcia-Molina H (2011) On the selection of tags for tag clouds. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM international conference on web search and data mining, WSDM'11. ACM, New York, pp 835–844. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1935826.1935855

Recommended Reading

  1. Hearst MA, Rosner D (2008) Tag clouds: data analysis tool or social signaler? In: Proceedings of the 41st annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, HICSS'08. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, p 160. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2008.422
  2. Helic D, Körner C, Granitzer M, Strohmaier M, Trat-tner C (2012) Navigational efficiency of broad vs. narrow folksonomies. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference on hypertext and social media, HT '12. ACM, New York, pp 63–72. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2309996.2310008
  3. Knautz K, Soubusta S, Stock WG (2010) Tag clusters as information retrieval interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii international conference on system sciences, HICSS'10. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, pp 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2010.360
  4. Koutrika G, Zadeh ZM, Garcia-Molina H (2009) Data clouds: summarizing keyword search results over structured data. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on extending database technology: advances in database technology, EDBT '09. ACM, New York, pp 391–402. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1516360.1516406
  5. Rivadeneira AW, Gruen DM, Muller MJ, Millen DR (2007) Getting our head in the clouds: toward evaluation studies of tagclouds. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, CHI '07. ACM, New York, pp 995–998. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240775
  6. Seifert C, Kump B, Kienreich W, Granitzer G, Granitzer M (2008) On the beauty and usability of tag clouds. In: 12th international conference on information visualisation, IV '08, pp 17–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IV.2008.89
  7. Sinclair J, Cardew-Hall M (2008) The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful? J Inf Sci 34(1): 15–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165551506078083

Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Knowledge Management Institute and Institute for Information Systems and Computer MediaGraz University of TechnologyGrazAustria
  2. 2.Knowledge Management InstituteGraz University of TechnologyGrazAustria
  3. 3.Computational Social Science GroupGESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social SciencesCologneGermany
  4. 4.Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Koblenz-LandauKoblenzGermany