Toward building aesthetic, useful and readable tag clouds for websites

Tag clouds provide a graphical method of summarizing content of a text document (e.g. of a Web page) with a set of phrases projected onto a plane. In this paper we consider building aesthetic tag clouds algorithmically for Web site use. General design choices in tag-cloud construction are analyzed. State of the art will be outlined along the lines of these design choices. Special requirements imposed on tag clouds used on web sites are presented. Rules of beautiful page setting existing in typography are discussed and subsequently applied in an attempt to quantify aesthetic aspect of tag cloud appearance. The quantification is performed with the goal of constructing an objective function to be optimized in tag cloud construction. Then, a mathematical formulation for tag clouds construction is given. Finally, algorithms constructing tag clouds by optimization are given.