Fringe Contacts

People-Tagging for the Enterprise

Stephen Farrell & Tessa Lau

IBM Almaden Research

Enterprise Contact Management

Tags & Contacts

Fringe Contacts UI

  • Anyone can tag anyone
  • Tag suggestions
  • Tag-based name completion
  • Clouds as filters
  • Social network
    • In & Out
    • Related by tags
  • Upload Buddy List
  • Data accessible via REST API

Tommy! by Helder Luz

  • Firefox Plug-In
  • Detects people-identifiers
  • Augments menu
  • Shows diverse data
    • Bookmarks
    • Blogs
    • Shared Folders
    • Fringe
  • First client of Fringe Contacts REST API

Bluepages+1: Individual

  • Org chart and directory
  • Other data sources
    • Blogs
    • Bookmarks
    • Pubs, patents
  • Incoming and outgoing tag clouds

Bluepages+1: Tag "Fringe"

  • People tagged: center
  • Taggers: right
  • Related tag cloud
  • Related bookmarks
  • Filters
    • Only in users network
    • Only people user tagged "Fringe"

Gaim-FC by Tessa Lau

  • Incoming and outgoing tags
  • Uses /command to
    • View tags
    • Add, Remove, Set tags
  • Other party notified of tags
  • Buddy list synced with FC
  • Tags appear in buddy list

FC-Visualization by Roo

  • Interactive Visualization
    • Click on person shuffles display
    • Click on tag highlights edges
  • Uses Prefuse for graph rendering
  • Uses FC's API GraphML output

Usage Anecdotes

  • Blog Central
    IBM's internal blogging system. This is where the system was announced, and bloggers make up the vast majority of its users. The tag "blogger" is removed from many analyses, since it distorted the charts.
  • "secondlife"
    As this game has taken off, people have begun tagging other players.
  • "chi2006"
    One user tagged everyone he knew that was going to chi2006 and sent an email to those people with a link to the group. Many of these people filled in the missing people, producing a (presumably) complete listing of everyone that attended that conference from IBM.

Usage Data

  • Usage since November 2005
    • 417 taggers
    • 2862 taggees
    • 3923 edges
  • Power law curves for
    • Person out-degree
    • Person in-degree
    • Tag degree

Kinds of tags: Observed

    • Characterization
      de, architect
    • Knowledge area
      java, km, collaboration
    • Project or activity
      dogear, ctt, secondlife
    • Events
      chi2006, lotusphere06
    • Local pride (?)
      hamburg, canada
    • Personal or fun
      got-served, unshaven
    • Buddylist import
      work, misc

Kinds of tags: Statistical

  • Tag distribution
    • X: # of users
    • Y: # of targets
    • log/log scale
  • Quadrants:
    Tags used by...
    • bottom-left
      few on few (excised)
    • top-left
      few people on many
    • top-right
      many on many
    • bottom-right
      many on a few

Authorities

  • Tag-based approach
    • Segment used by many on a few tags
    • Define authority:
      Most frequently tagged
    • Define hub:
      Tagged (or tagged by) many authorities
  • Kleinberg hubs-authorities
    • Chakrabarti variant, using tags for anchor text
    • But...
      • We have higher signal-to-noise ratio
      • Each arc represents a significant effort by an employee (excepting buddy list imports)
      • Much smaller data set

Vocabulary Issues

  • IBM invented the TLA
    I recently learned ODW is now TWE
    • Most projects and groups have TLA names, which is one significant class of tag
    • Particularly susceptable to polysemy
      WBI to me means "Web Intermediary", but to most inside IBM it means "Websphere Business Integrator"
    • When resolve a TLA in Fringe Contacts, find people... this is sometimes helpful
  • Future work: put tags in context of social network or organization
    E.g., the Stephen Farrell-centered "Fringe", or the Research Division's "Fringe" tag.

Tag-based data integration

  • It's often difficult to tie related resources in different systems together
  • Tags provide a mechanism for data-integration
    • Many new systems have tagging built in
    • Things tagged "fringe" in one system are likely to be related to things tagged "fringe" in another
    • Using feeds, tagged objects from other systems can easily be shown as peripheral content
    • New(?) class of system: tag integrator
    • Dogear is integrated into Bluepages+1 this way

Conclusion

  • Ongoing work, expect to hear more
    • Usability needs improvement
    • Needs to be more widely deployed
    • More plugins and integration points
  • Integrate into general social network APIs
  • Use to augment expertise search
  • Compare with how tags are used in Dogear
    (IBM's del.icio.us)
  • Enable tagging of non-IBMers