An investigation of the levels of abstraction of tags across three resource genres

This study investigates how resource genres affect the specificity or level of abstraction of user-generated tags. This study found significant variations in frequency of assignment of superordinate, subordinate and basic level terms representing news, blog and ecommerce resource genres. Study observed users' preferences to represent news and blog resources with basic or subordinate level tags and ecommerce resources with superordinate and basic level of tags. Study also observed multifaceted representation of resource genres, suggesting that use of genre tags is “situated” and grounded in language. This study suggests that representation of knowledge based on resource genres and levels of abstraction of user-generated tags may improve representation, organization, and findability of the resources in the distributed knowledge environments.