Helping online communities to semantically enrich folksonomies

Abstract

This paper presents our approach to collaborative and semi-automated semantic structuring of folksonomies. Tags freely provided by users of online communities are not semantically linked, and this hinders significantly the potentials for browsing and exploring these data. We propose a socio-technical system combining automatic handlings of tags, using state of the art algorithm, and user friendly interfaces designed after a careful analysis of the usage of our target communities. Much like folksonomies, our socio-technical system lets each user maintain his own view while still benefiting from others contributions. As a complement to similar approaches, our approach supports conflicting point of views all along the life-cycle of semantically enriched folksonomies.