A Practical Application of FRBR for Organizing Information in Digital Environments

This study employs the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) conceptual model to provide in-depth investigation on the characteristics of social tags by analyzing the bibliographic attributes of tags that are not limited to subject properties. FRBR describes four different levels of entities (i.e., Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item), which provide a distinguishing understanding of each entity in the bibliographic universe. In this research, since the scope of data analysis focuses on tags assigned to web documents, consideration on Manifestation and Item has been excluded. Accordingly, only the attributes of Work and Expression entity were investigated in order to map the attributes of tags to attributes defined in those entities. The content analysis on tag attributes was conducted on a total of 113 web documents regarding 11 attribute categories defined by FRBR. The findings identified essential bibliographic attributes of tags and tagging behaviors by subject. The findings showed that concerning specific subject areas, taggers exhibited different tagging behaviors representing distinctive features and tendencies. These results have led to the conclusion that there should be an increased awareness of diverse user needs by subject in terms of the practical implications of metadata generation.