Agent-mediated shared conceptualizations in tagging services

Abstract

Some of the most remarkable innovative technologies from the Web 2.0 are the collaborative tagging systems. They allow the use of folksonomies as a useful structure for a number of tasks in the social web, such as navigation and knowledge organization. One of the main deficiencies comes from the tagging behaviour of different users which causes semantic heterogeneity in tagging. As a consequence a user cannot benefit from the adequate tagging of others. In order to solve the problem, an agent-based reconciliation knowledge system, based on Formal Concept Analysis, is applied to facilitate the semantic interoperability between personomies. This article describes experiments that focus on conceptual structures produced by the system when it is applied to a collaborative tagging service, Delicious. Results will show the prevalence of shared tags in the sharing of common resources in the reconciliation process.