WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010with her/his students the slides of the lecture, the video of the presentation, the pictures that s/he took duringthe event, and the blog posts of other participants about the same conference. To do it, the teacher will haveto possess accounts in, at least, four different systems and, consequently, to deal with four different interfacesand to manage four distinct personomies. We highlight four points regarding this context:1) The complexity of learning how to use several different systems: As these systems have the objectiveof organize resources, it is natural that they have common similarity in terms of features available to theusers. However, the way the interface is designed affects users’ behavior, expectative and productivity,because they will have to apply some effort and spend some time in being familiarized with the system and inunderstanding it. 2) The categorizations coherence: Because users have to use a different system for doingthe categorization of different objects, it is very difficult for them remembering the tags previously selectedwhen categorizing objects in other systems. Therefore, the coherence of the tags used to categorize objectsconcerning the same context can be compromised. Users can easily forget what tags they ascribed before;they also can be induced by the system interface (e.g., tags recommendation) or by their previous activities.3) The management of the users’ vocabularies: Having different personomies spread over multiple systemsincreases the chances of occurring problems in the users’ vocabularies, such as noises, unmeaning terms,synonym, polysemy, etc. Furthermore, the management of the vocabulary of tags is a complex activity. Ifusers need to rename, add, or remove a tag from a set of objects, they have to execute this task manually ineach categorization accomplished with that tag in each system, what is a tedious and easy to fail process. Thissituation contributes for the augment of the long tail in the users’ vocabulary (da Silva and da Silva, 2008).Tags belonging to the long tail can represent users’ particularity, knowledge, preferences, etc., but difficultiesin managing users’ vocabulary harms the benefits that could be obtained from this long tail by insertingnoises terms that will not be useful even to the user who created it. 4) The loss of the knowledgeemergence: A personomy can provide rich information about its creators representing the way they see theinformation, how they think about the world and create organizational schemes, what their preferences andinterests are, and so on. However, as the whole is quite different from the sum of its parts, we are losing theopportunity of studying the users’ behavior and identifying the users’ knowledge in a more complete way.Because their personomies are spread over several systems, we cannot analyze the users when they arecategorizing and retrieving information despite the object and system in use. Consequently, we do not knowif the information obtained when putting all these pieces together would be the same obtained whenanalyzing the whole as a unique personomy.According to our discussions, there are many problems and difficulties in using tags to categorizeinformation due to its lack of control and structures for the organization, and these problems and difficultiesare emphasized when we consider multiple systems and multiple personomies. The points we explainedabove show how this situation harms the maintenance of a consistent personomy and make it difficult fortaking advantages of folksonomy benefits even at the user-level (individual). Following, we present anddiscuss an approach for centralizing and managing the users’ vocabulary and for searching over a set oftagging-based systems. This approach is being implemented in a system called TagManager.3. TAGMANAGER: A TAG-FOCUSED APPROACHThe TagManager system (TM) is an initiative for allowing users to centralize and manage their vocabulariesand to retrieve information spread over a set of folksonomy-based systems (da Silva and da Silva, 2008). Itsmain idea is to provide an environment in which users can manage all their personomies without dealing withdifferent interfaces and using different vocabularies. Currently, the TM system allows users to synchronizeand manipulate data over four different systems: Delicious, SlideShare, YouTube and Flickr and are availablejust for testing. The system aims at reducing the impact caused by the lack of integration among folksonomybasedsystems, which is done by centralizing users’ vocabulary and by offering resources to organize andmaintain these vocabularies. On the other side, TM also makes it possible to retrieve information overmultiple systems. Thus, when users search for a certain tag, it is possible to retrieve objects categorized withthat tag in each one of these four systems according to the users’ preference, reducing users’ workload inaccessing and retrieving information in each one separately.The important difference between the TM system and other tagging/folksonomy-based systems is itscentral pivot. Usually, the central pivot of a tagging-based system is the “object” being labeled with tags by147