How Social Is Social Tagging?

Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in today's web and have attracted the interest of our research community in a variety of investigations. This has led to several assumptions about tagging, such as that tagging systems exhibit a social component. In this work we overcome the previous absence of data for testing such an assumption. We thoroughly study social interaction, leveraging for the first time live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system BibSonomy. Our results indicate that sharing of resources constitutes an important and indeed social aspect of tagging.