Relationships among category semantics, perceptions of term utility, and term length and order in a social content creation system

While there are increased efforts to extend existing controlled vocabularies through harvesting socially created image metadata from content creation communities (e.g., Flickr), questions remain about the quality and reuse value of this metadata. Data from a controlled experiment was used to examine relationships among categories of image tags, tag assignment order, and users' perception of usefulness of preassigned image index terms. Preliminary findings indicate that, on average, "Group" category terms were assigned first, and were also rated highest in usefulness. Other broad tag categories that were assigned earlier and rated more useful were Human Attributes and People, but others were more variable. However, the study found no correlation between tag length and assignment order, or term length and its perceived usefulness. The study's findings can inform the design of controlled vocabularies, indexing processes, and retrieval systems for images.