Analysing the Factors That Influence Tag Choice Based on Semiotic Analysis and Activity Theory

Social tagging has become popular around the Internet as well as in research. The main idea behind tagging is to allow users to provide metadata to the web content from their perspective to facilitate categorization and retrieval. There are many factors that influence users´ tag choice. Many studies have been conducted to reveal these factors by analysing tagging data. This paper uses two theories to identify these factors, namely the semiotics theory and activity theory. The former treats tags as signs and the latter treats tagging as an activity. The theoretical analysis produced a framework that was used to identify a number of factors. These factors can be considered as categories that can be consulted to influence user tagging choice in order to support particular tagging behaviour, such as cross-lingual tagging.