Research On The Differentiation Of Users’ Motivation In Social Tagging Based On Information Entropy

In social tagging system, the user can freely define tags or directly use the tags recommended by tagging system to label the information resources, which awakens the enthusiasm and initiative of the public participation. However, what is the motivation for the users to carry out the tagging, which has aroused the interest of experts and scholars, and this is also the key problem of the user’s intrinsic tagging mechanism in social tagging system. However, the existing research mainly focuses on analyzing the type of the user’s tagging motivation and the influence factors in the macro level, which is less concerned about the user’s personal information. The actual situation is that the tagging’ motivation of the different types of users or the same user in different situations are always different. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the users’ tagging motivation viewing from the perspective of users’ activity.Combined with the National Natural Science Fund Project ―Research on the personalized information service based on the context aware in the ubiquitous computing environment‖(project NO.:71471165), This paper explores individual differentiation of users’ tagging motivation in social tagging systems, and the main work of this thesis is as follows:(1) According to the similarity between the users using tags to label resources and searching resources based on tag set in social tagging systems and information being encoded and decoded in digital communication system, the social tagging system is regarded as a digital communication system, and then every user’s tagging behavior is constructed to be a tag-resource association matrix.(2)On the basis of regarded as a digital communication system, two types of basic tagging motivations of ―selfish‖ and ―altruistic‖ in social tagging systems are distinguished from the perspective of encoding and decoding as well as the users servicing themselves and servicing community. Also, the measures used to describe users’ tagging motivation, such as the encoding entropy, the decoding entropy and the degree of self-utility, are defined.(3)An empirical study is carried out with the data from Last.fm and Delicious and the empirical results show that users’ tagging behavior not only serves to share resources which is ―altruistic‖ also serves to discover and retrieve resources for themselves which is the ―selfish‖, and the ―self- utility‖ is enhanced and is gradually stabilized in the ―self-utility‖ level of the system with the increasing of users’ activity. The empirical results are further explained from the functions, popularization of tags and self-organization of system, and some suggestions for both tagging users and service providers of social tagging system are given.