Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags

Introduction

With the rise of Web 2.0, websites which provide content creation and sharing features have become extremely popular. Many users have become actively involved in adding specific metadata in the form of tags and content annotations in various social software applications. While the initial purpose of tagging is to help users organize and manage their own resources, collective tagging of common resources can be used to organize information via informal distributed classification systems called folksonomies (Mathes, 2004; Merholz, 2004).

Studies of tagging and folksonomies can be divided into two main approaches: (a) semantic tagging concentrates on folksonomies that are inconsistent and even inaccurate because a large group of untrained users assign free-form terms to resources without guidance. Since this approach aims to resolve tag ambiguities, a wealth of ideas and efforts is emerging regarding how to use and combine ontologies with folksonomies (Weller, 2007); (b) social networking focuses on a community of users interested in a specific topic that may emerge over time because of their use of tags (Mika, 2005). The power of social tagging lies in the aggregation of information (Quintarelli, 2005). Aggregation of information involves social reinforcement by reinforcing social connections and providing social search mechanisms. Thus, a community built around tagging activities can be considered a social network with an insight into relations between topics and users.

Using freely determined vocabularies by a participant is less costly than employing an expert (Sinclair & Cardew-Hall, 2007) and a cognitive load of tagging in comparison with taxonomies or ontology is relatively low (Merholz, 2004). However, tagging the data from social media sites without a social exchange is regarded as an individual set of metadata rather than a social one. Although tagging captures individual conceptual associations, the tagging system itself does not promote a social transmission that unites both creators and consumers. To create social transmission environments for tagging, one needs a consistent way of exchanging and sharing tagging data across various applications or sources. In this sense, a formal conceptual model to represent tagging data plays a critical role in encouraging its exchange and interoperation. Semantic Web techniques and approaches help social tagging systems to eliminate tagging ambiguities.