Relational Tag Cloud
04 | 2007
Tagging is a metadata creation approach provided by blogs, social bookmarking tools and various web 2.0 applications. Tagging-based systems enable users to categorise content by means of freely chosen keywords, tags.
A tag cloud depicts the content tags of a website. Usually, more frequently used tags are displayed in a larger font, and the display order is alphabetical.
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The following sketch illustrates the idea that related tags are connected and visualised as a graph. Each tag is represented as a node and nodes are considered to be related if they are attached to the same item. The more often a tag appears the bigger it is.
The tag cloud above illustrates the most common tags of del.icio.us and their relational structure.
Source Code
The del.icio.us relational tag cloud generator python script is released under the GPL license. Its output is an MXML file that can be compiled to flash using the Adobe Flex 2 compiler. The MXML requires the SpringGraph Flex Component by Mark Shepherd.
Download delicious-reltags.py.
Credits
Idea, development: Gabor Papp
SpringGraph: Mark Shepherd
Thanks to Peter Halacsy and Adam Somlai-Fischer