Summarizing dynamic Social Tagging Systems

• We propose a method for summarizing an evolving multi-modal social network.
• The method offers an accurate overview of entities staying representative in time.
• We report on experiments with real data from the Bibsonomy social tagging system.
• Our results show how the method deals with the dynamics of social networks.

Social tagging is a popular method that allows users of social networks to share annotation in the form of keywords, called tags, assigned to resources. Social tagging addresses information overload by easing the task of locating interesting entities in a social network. Nevertheless, users can still be overwhelmed by too many tags posted at each moment. A process is needed that offers an accurate overview of the representative entities and their relationships with each other, while dealing with the dynamics of social tagging and of tags’ semantics. We propose a method for the automated summarization of an evolving multi-modal social network, focusing on the entities that stay representative over time for some subnetwork in the social tagging system. We report on experiments with real data from the Bibsonomy social tagging system, where we compare our dynamic approach with a static one.