Bridging informal tagging and formal semantics via hybrid navigation

  • Authors:

  • Leonardo Lezcano;Elena García-Barriocanal;Miguel-Angel Sicilia

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Alcalá, Spain;University of Alcalá, Spain;University of Alcalá, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Information Science
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The folksonomies resulting from user-generated tag systems feature rapid adaptability, and reflect the information needs of their supporting user communities. However, they suffer from well-known problems, such as polysemy, heteronymy and lack of recall, which have been addressed in controlled vocabularies and ontologies, which in turn follow slower but more controlled evolution processes. These differences have led to the bridging approach described in this paper, which is based on mapping tags to ontology elements. Mappings can be automatically generated or explicitly provided by user-created assertions between tags and ontology elements. The main objective is to combine existing tag navigation, such as that featured in Delicious, with related tag recommendations obtained from ontology relations, in order to provide a hybrid navigation context that benefits folksonomy browsing. The implementation of such integration, combining Delicious and the OpenCyc knowledge base, is described, along with an evaluation of its potential in improving navigation through the user-generated tag system. The results reveal that the new semantic shortcuts and the decrease in dead ends can substantially influence the collaborative bookmarking experience.