Folksonomy visualisations

This page links to three visualisations created as part of the social software evaluation study.

  1. Self-Organising model. A complex, dynamic visualisation that attempts to model how closely related the tags in the folksonomy are to each other.
  2. WordNet trees. An experiment in applying the folksonomy's tags to a standard thesaurus in an attempt to model the semantic information that can be extracted.
  3. Folksonomy Pivot Graph. A visualisation that links together all three elements of the folksonomy: users, sites and tags.

Browser notes. These visualisations were created using "scalable vector graphics" an open-source, web-standard. Different browsers have different levels of support for this format and we do not have the resources to ensure that each visualisation has versions that can be explored under all browsers. As a rule of thumb, the visualisations work best using the browser "Opera". Firefox is adequate for 1) and 2) but cannot present the "pivot link" in 3). Internet Explorer 7 will run all three visualisation but lacks some information in 1). Other browsers such as Netscape and Safari are quite limited.This is quite a complex visualisation. It runs best using modern browsers, especially the browser, Opera. It also works well under Firefox and related mozilla browsers. It does work under Internet Explorer 7 (though some of the formatting is lost) but does not work well under previous versions of Internet Explorer.


This model was produced by Dave Everitt and Ben Daglish. Some other interesting folksonomy visualisations can be found on Well-formed Data and via IBM's visualiser - Many Eyes.

Contact: Prof. Sue Thomas, School of Media and Cultural Production, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK. Tel. +44 (0)116 207 8266, fax +44 (0) 116 257 7199, email Sue.Thomas at dmu dot ac dot uk. http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/