Comparative Analysis of Index Terms and Social Tags: Medical Subject Headings vs. BibSonomy and Delicious

초록

This paper demonstrates the comparative analysis of the similarity and difference between Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and social tags. Both types of metadata have the same purpose—that is, succinctly abstracting content of a given document—but are created from heterogeneous viewpoints. The former MeSH terms show the aspects of publication related professionals, whereas the latter social tags are from the perspectives of general readers. When both types of metadata are assigned to the same publications, do they consist of different nomenclatures reflecting the heterogeneous viewpoints or are they similar, since both metadata types describe the same publications? Social tags are also compared with family terms of MeSH terms in the given MeSH hierarchy, so as to understand the specificity of social tags, related to MeSH terms. Lastly, given the fact that readers assign social tags in casual ways without any restricted vocabulary, we tested how many social tags contain consumer health terms, which are familiar to laypeople. Through these comparisons, we ultimately aim to examine how much the highly controlled publication index reflects general readers’ cognitive understandings and stress the necessity of general readers’ involvement in the publication indexing process.

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