Publikationen

Researching the emergence of semantics in social systems needs totake into account how users process information in their cognitive system. Wereport results of an experimental study in which we examined the interactionbetween individual expertise and the basic level advantage in collaborative tagging.The basic level advantage describes availability in memory of certain preferredlevels of taxonomic abstraction when categorizing objects and has beenshown to vary with level of expertise. In the study, groups of students taggedinternet resources for a 10-week period. We measured the availability of tags inmemory with an association test and a relevance rating and found a basic leveladvantage for tags from more general as opposed to specific levels of the taxonomy.An interaction with expertise also emerged. Contrary to our expectations,groups that spent less time to develop a shared understanding shifted tomore specific levels as compared to groups that spent more time on a topic. Weattribute this to impaired collaboration in the groups. We discuss implicationsfor personalized tag and resource recommendations.