Social semantic cloud of tags: semantic model for folksonomies

Abstract

A growing number of tagging applications have begun to provide users the ability to socialise their own keywords. Tagging, which assigns a set of keywords to resources, has become a powerful way for organising, browsing, and publicly sharing personal collections of resources on the Web. It is called folksonomies. These systems on current social websites, however, have deficiencies in defining tag's meaning, and are often blocked to users in order to reuse, share, and exchange the tags across heterogeneous websites. In this paper, we describe a semantic model for expressing folksonomies in social websites. This model, called Social Semantic Cloud of Tags, aims to provide a consistent format of representing folksonomies and some features in terms of tagging activities. We describe core concepts and relevant properties such as a popularity and usage of tags, along with deduced relationships between tags. We will discuss how this model helps to reduce drawbacks regarding tag sharing between users, applications, or folksonomies. Knowledge Management Research & Practice (2010) 8, 193-202. doi: 10.1057/kmrp.2010.10