A survey of tag cloud presentation techniques

A survey of tag cloud
presentation techniques

Mogens Nielsen

June 6th 2007

Introduction

•
About tag clouds

–
What and why?

•
Current presentation techniques

•
New presentation techniques

•
Proof of concept

Intention

•
Show current presentation techniques

•
Show new presentation techniques

•
Discuss different presentation techniques

•
Show suggestions to second generation tag
clouds

Method

•
Literature study

•
Read weblogs to find general interest in tag
clouds

•
Proof of concept to show an example of a
second generation tag cloud

Contribution

•
Tag clouds are a new information visualization
interface

•
Still in the ”prototype” phase

•
More users and areas of implementation leads
to more needs for functionality

•
Many suggestions to new techniques

•
This paper will try to gather the available
information (create ”order” in the ”chaos”)

Current presentation techniques

•
First generation tag cloud (from Flickr)


Current presentation techniques

•
Some limitations of the first generation tag
cloud

–
Alphabetical arrangement does not infer
relationships between tags

–
One or more topics tend to dominate the cloud
with their tags

–
Static; no implementation of time

–
No interactivity

New presentation techniques

•
Clustering tags in the tag cloud

•
Time management

•
Interactivity

Clustered tag clouds

•
Shows relations between tags

•
Limits the synonym problem of tagging
(folksonomies)

•
Less significant tags disappears

•
Tags with higher meaning emerge and thereby
reducing semantic density

•
The dominating topics are less dominating

Clustered tag clouds

Temporal tag clouds

•
Ability to discover trends and emerging tags

•
Shorter popularity decay gives us a less static
tag cloud

•
Cloudalicious: Shows how a webpage is
tagged over time

•
Google Trends: Shows search trends on
Google

•
Flickr: Three stages of tag cloud time frame

Interactive tag clouds

•
Allow the user to choose the presentation of
the tag cloud at her choice

•
Interactivity gives the user a greater impact on
which information the tag cloud should
visualize

•
No interactive tag clouds

–

Delicious Tagrolls

Proof of concept

•
PoC to show a vision of abilities in a second
generation tag cloud

•
Implements interactivity which enables the
user

–
To choose time frame

–
To zoom

Conclusion

•
Tag clouds are in the starting phase as
information visualization interfaces

•
New implementations and presentation
techniques are needed

•
This paper intends to

–
Create an order in the chaos

–
Show a vision of a second generation tag cloud

Demo and questions




Thank you for listening