tagused

Tagused is a term used in information systems to describe the usage pattern of tags in a tagging or folksonomy environment. It can refer to a property of individual items, a user’s tagging behavior, or a system-wide metric that quantifies how extensively tags are applied.

In practice, tagused for an item is often the number of distinct tags assigned to it, known as its tag set size. At the system level, tagused can describe the distribution of tag usage across items, or the core tags that appear most frequently.

Methods to measure tagused include counting unique tags per item, computing tag frequency, and analyzing co-occurrence graphs where tags linked if they appear on the same item.

Tagused informs various applications such as content discovery, navigation, and recommendations. A high tagused per item may indicate rich metadata, while uneven tag usage can signal synonyms, ambiguity, or taxonomy gaps.

Limitations include tag ambiguity, polysemy, and the dynamic nature of folksonomies. Normalization across datasets and governance policies are often required to compare tagused values meaningfully.

Example: A blog post with tags science, physics, quantum mechanics has a tagused value of three for that item, while across the site some tags like tech or review may reach high global tagused.

See also: Tag, Tag cloud, Folksonomy, Taxonomy, Metadata, Tag frequency.