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Tag Clouds

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining

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Synonyms

Keyword Clouds; Tagclouds; Term Clouds

Glossary

Resource:

Any kind of web content, e.g., documents, hyperlinks, images, or videos, that is uniquely addressable

Tag:

A short string, term, or word that describes an online resource and that is applied by a person

Word Cloud:

A visualization method that shows the top N most frequent words of a text document

Definition

A tag cloud is a visualization method that summarizes a set of tags related to a certain resource or a set of resources in a visually appealing manner. Contrary to a word cloud, the tags in the tag cloud are generated by people and refer to resources through links. Usually, a tag cloud shows the topmost N tags of one particular online resource, a set of resources, or the resources of the whole system. A very basic and at the same time very popular approach for tag clouds calculation is an algorithm that sorts the tags by alphabet and indicates the importance of each tag by font size (see Fig. 1). However, today a...

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References

  • Bateman S, Gutwin C, Nacenta M (2008) Seeing things in the clouds: the effect of visual features on tag cloud selections. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, HT’08. ACM, New York, pp 193–202. doi: 10.1145/1379092.1379130

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  • Helic D, Trattner C, Strohmaier M, Andrews K (2011) Are tag clouds useful for navigation? A network-theoretic analysis. Int J Soc Comput Cyber-Phys Syst 1(1):33–55. doi:10.1504/IJSCCPS.2011.043601

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  • Tagclouds (2012) Tagclouds.com. http://www.tagclouds.com. Accessed 08 Aug 2012

  • TagExplorer (2012) Sandbox from Yahoo! research http://tagexplorer.sandbox.yahoo.com. Accessed 08 Aug 2012

  • Trattner C (2012) On the navigability of social tagging systems. Dissertation, Graz University of Technology, Graz, pp 1–240. https://online.tugraz.at/tugonline/wbAbs.showThesis?pThesisNr=46709

  • Trattner C, Lin Yl, Parra D, Yue Z, Real W, Brusilovsky P (2012) Evaluating tag-based information access in image collections. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference on hypertext and social media, HT’12. ACM, New York, pp 113–122. doi: 10.1145/2309996.2310016

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Recommended Reading

  • Hearst MA, Rosner D (2008) Tag clouds: data analysis tool or social signaler? In: Proceedings of the 41st annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, HICSS’08. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, p 160. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2008.422

  • Helic D, Körner C, Granitzer M, Strohmaier M, Trat-tner C (2012) Navigational efficiency of broad vs. narrow folksonomies. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference on hypertext and social media, HT’12. ACM, New York, pp 63–72. doi: 10.1145/2309996.2310008

  • Knautz K, Soubusta S, Stock WG (2010) Tag clusters as information retrieval interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii international conference on system sciences, HICSS’10. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, pp 1–10. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2010.360

  • Koutrika G, Zadeh ZM, Garcia-Molina H (2009) Data clouds: summarizing keyword search results over structured data. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on extending database technology: advances in database technology, EDBT’09. ACM, New York, pp 391–402. doi: 10.1145/1516360.1516406

  • Rivadeneira AW, Gruen DM, Muller MJ, Millen DR (2007) Getting our head in the clouds: toward evaluation studies of tagclouds. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, CHI’07. ACM, New York, pp 995–998. doi: 10.1145/1240624.1240775

  • Seifert C, Kump B, Kienreich W, Granitzer G, Granitzer M (2008) On the beauty and usability of tag clouds. In: 12th international conference on information visualisation, IV’08, pp 17–25. doi: 10.1109/IV.2008.89

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Acknowledgments

This work is in parts supported by funding from the BMVIT – the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (grant no. 829590); the FWF Austrian Science Fund Grant I677; and the Know-Center, Graz.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Knowledge Management Institute and Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Christoph Trattner

  2. Knowledge Management Institute, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Denis Helic

  3. Computational Social Science Group, GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany

    Markus Strohmaier

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany

    Markus Strohmaier

Authors
  1. Christoph Trattner
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  2. Denis Helic
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  3. Markus Strohmaier
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christoph Trattner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

    Reda Alhajj

  2. University of Calgary Computer Science, Calgary, Canada

    Jon Rokne

Section Editor information

  1. Institute for Web Science and Technologies, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany

    Thomas Gottron

  2. YU, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Stefan Schlobach

  3. Institute for Web Science and Technologies, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany

    Steffen Staab

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Trattner, C., Helic, D., Strohmaier, M. (2017). Tag Clouds. In: Alhajj, R., Rokne, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7163-9_126-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7163-9_126-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-7163-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7163-9

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