Group items tagged

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, ASU. Interactive online civics curriculum, free to all users

This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center's (SFLC's) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur. It introduces and explains basic legal concepts related to the GPL and its enforcement by copyright holders. It also outlines business practices and methods that lead to better GPL compliance. Finally, it recommends proper post-violation responses to the concerns of copyright holders.

I'm going to have more to say about data, databases, and intellectual property rights in the coming months. This longish post provides a basic primer on how U.S. copyright law applies to databases.

A Declaration of Virtual World Policy made by representatives of law, industry, and academia, assembled in full and free convention as the first Synthetic Worlds Congress.

The full text of The Future of Reputation is now available online for free. Click on the links below to download PDFs of each chapter. The front matter to the book is at the beginning of each chapter.

The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc

Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research data and materials easier to find and use.

Media Cloud is a project that tracks news content comprehensively - providing open, free, and flexible tools. This will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends. For instance, some of our driving questions are: 1. Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around? 2. What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources? 3. Where do stories begin? 4. How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications? 5. Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source? 6. How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage? 7. Can we track news cycles for specific issues? 8. Do online comments shape the news?