Why Do Folksonomies Need Semantic Web Technologies? Hak-Lae Kim Samsung Electronics Co., LTD
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) Association for Information Systems AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) Americas Conference on Information Systems AMCIS 2010 Proceedings (AMCIS) 8-2010 Why Do Folksonomies Need Semantic Web Technologies? Hak-Lae Kim Samsung Electronics Co., LTD. 416, Maetan-3dong, Yeongtong-gu Suwon-city, Gyeonggi-do, 443-742 Korea, [email protected] Jae-Hwa Choi Dankook University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2010 Recommended Citation Kim, Hak-Lae and Choi, Jae-Hwa, "Why Do Folksonomies Need Semantic Web Technologies?" (2010). AMCIS 2010 Proceedings. 68. http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2010/68 This material is brought to you by the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in AMCIS 2010 Proceedings by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact [email protected]. Kim, et al. Why Do Folksonomies Need Semantic Web Technologies? Why Do Folksonomies Need Semantic Web Technologies? Hak-Lae Kim Jae-Hwa Choi Samsung Electronics Co., LTD. College of Business 416, Maetan-3dong, Yeongtong-gu Dankook University Suwon-city, Gyeonggi-do, 443-742 San#29, Anseo-dong, Dongnam-gu, Cheonan-si, Korea Chungnam, 330-714, Korea [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper is to investigate some general features of social tagging and folksonomies along with their advantages and disadvantages, and to present an overview of a tag ontology that can be used to represent tagging data at a semantic level using Semantic Web technologies. Several tag ontologies have been developed with a specific purpose and used in various websites. However, in order to represent tagging data at semantic level existing tag ontologies need to be interlinked, since individual tag ontology cannot represent overall features of tagging activities. After introducing conceptual overview of tagging and folksonomies and tag ontologies, we will propose the combinational model for linking tag ontologies. Keywords Folksonomies, Semantic Web, Ontology, Tag Ontology. INTRODUCTION The idea of tagging is simple: people are tagging the content they create in public spaces with free-text keywords, and the collection of many people’s keywords can serve as useful metadata when aggregated (Gruber, 2007). Based on this principle, a growing number of tagging applications have begun to provide users with the ability to connect to other users via their own keywords. Tagging plays an important role in the emergence and production of an incredible amount of distributed information by communicating, collaborating, and sharing tagged resources amongst users. With this new phenomena, classification on the Web is now changing in that online resources can easily be classified in many different categories beyond the types we encounter in the physical world (Weinberger, 2005). The results of tagging are emerging as collective semantics created through active user participation. The increasing interest in tagging leads to new challenges in order to improve the findability of resources and connectivity between people. Although tagging is an evolving and “bottom-up” approach based on users’ contributions, representing the social connectivity between the entities that make up tagging activities has to be discovered and improved. For instance, detractors of tagging refer to a lack of precision and low findability as major limitations which prevent the sharing of tagging data (Mathes, 2004). We believe that we can leverage this new model of tagging content on the Socal Web by combining it with alternative but complementary technologies such as the Semantic Web. The objectives of this research are to 1) explore overall features of tagging and folksonomies, including definitions, advantages and disadvantages, 2) propose a combinational model based on tag ontologies to make tagging data unambiguous and to be shared tagging activities across heterogeneous sources. The contributions can be summarised: 1) identify the differences between folksonomies and ontologies, 2) address the reasons that folksonomies can be represented by ontologies, 3) propose a combinational model by interlinking existing tag ontologies in order to represent tagging data at a semantic model. In the following sections, we will begin by clarifying the various concepts and terminologies related to tagging, and then we will discuss the distinct roles that are present in tagging processes. SOCIAL TAGGING CONCEPTS Definition A tag is a metadata keyword or a labeled term associated with a resource such as a link, web page, picture, or blog post, etc. Previously, research literature on tagging dealt primarily with online resources such as blog posts (Mathes, 2004; Proceedings of the Sixteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Lima, Peru, August 12-15, 2010. 1 Kim, et al. Why Do Folksonomies Need Semantic Web Technologies? Merholz, 2004; Mejias, 2005; Kroski, 2005; Vander Wal, 2005). Tags are in general chosen by people (e.g. the content creator or author, a consumer or reader, etc.), and are based on their understanding of a resource according to their own perceived utility, where they are not chosen from existing controlled vocabularies or strict taxonomies (Mathes, 2004). The idea of tags is that they reflect the end user’s thoughts or intentions by using informal personally preferred terms. While users who create tags do not necessarily have to be experts, the terms as keywords, categories, or classifications for the resource hold an intended meaning for the users (Golder and Huberman, 2006). Once tags are assigned to a resource, different users or applications can use and share them in several ways. In this sense, tags can be seen as a simple way to allow users to interact with a site or a service based on a richer experience and a sense of participation (Mathes, 2004; Kroski, 2005). Figure 1 Tagging model: People tag a specific resource (e.g. a photo) with term(s). Tagging is the overall activity of contributing to a collection of tags by users. As shown Figure 1, tagging requires people to participate in tagging activities for their own specific reasons and thus the entity of this process includes users, tags, and resources as well as their relationships. In this perspective, the tagging process goes with an implicit agreement of sharing tagging entities amongst users, rather than being just a process of sharing resources. A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system and is formed from a collection of keywords created by users. This can be defined as a social, shared categorisation system influenced and consumed by or across users, reflecting varied perspectives in a collaborative and decentralised way (Golder and Huberman, 2006; Marlow et al., 2006; Halpin and Shepherd, 2007). Thomas Vander Wal, the person who coined the term, emphasises “user-generated classification, emerging through bottom-up consensus” (Vander Wal, 2005). He asserts that a folksonomy, as a fusion of the words ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’, is composed of three important components - the tags themselves, the resources that are being tagged, and the users that create these tags. A real large-scale application of folksonomy usage appeared with Delicious in late 2003, and this was subsequently adopted by various other social software sites. According to Vander Wal (2005), folksonomies are distinguished by two typologies: broad and narrow folksonomies. The former refers to where many people are describing the same object with their tags in a system such as Delicious. In a tagging space, everyone can tag an object according to their interests, even if the methods of tagging used among them is different. Thus, the power law of tagging behaviours observes that most tags appear only once or rarely in a small groups or few users, whereas a few popular tags are often used by many users (Quintarelli, 2005). Broad folksonomies, following a variety of levels of user participation, are a way of investigating the benefit of the network effect and other trends in tagging. In contrast to broad ones, narrow folksonomies mean that a small number of users will tag individual objects (e.g. as is the case with Flickr). At present, tagging on a large number of social software sites has become quite popular, and tagging in traditional web sites (e.g. message boards) is being adopted at a steady pace. Some well-known implementations of folksonomies are Delicious and Flickr. The former is a social bookmarking system where users tag and store web links, which they want to find again in the future, while the latter is a photo-sharing web site where users upload and tag their own photos to aid Proceedings of the Sixteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Lima, Peru, August 12-15, 2010. 2 Kim, et al. Why Do Folksonomies Need Semantic Web Technologies? retrieval by themselves and others. CiteULike 1, using a similar approach to Delicious, focuses on academic articles, and there are number of multimedia sites that support tagging such as Last.fm 2 for music and YouTube 3 for videos. From an information visualisation perspective, tag clouds are the most popular visual interface to represent multiple tags and for navigating resources. Typically tags displayed in a tag cloud on most sites are differentiated by size, font or color depending on how many times the tag has been used or how many resources have been assigned with that tag (Hayman, 2007). Social Tagging and Its Terminologies In any emerging field, a new phenomenon will have a corresponding set of new terms that describe it or are related to it, and there are numerous definitions for the tagging phenomenon as a method of categorising information. The term folksonomy is emerging as the dominant term: there is however a lack of clarity when talking about tagging and folksonomies, as these terms are often used interchangeably to describe the same phenomenon.