Exploring social annotations for the semantic web

In order to obtain a machine understandable semantics for web resources, research on the Semantic Web tries to annotate web resources with concepts and relations from explicitly defined formal ontologies. This kind of formal annotation is usually done manually or semi-automatically. In this paper, we explore a complement approach that focuses on the "social annotations of the web" which are annotations manually made by normal web users without a predefined formal ontology. Compared to the formal annotations, although social annotations are coarse-grained, informal and vague, they are also more accessible to more people and better reflect the web resources' meaning from the users' point of views during their actual usage of the web resources. Using a social bookmark service as an example, we show how emergent semantics [2] can be statistically derived from the social annotations. Furthermore, we apply the derived emergent semantics to discover and search shared web ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Xian Wu, Lei Zhang, Yong Yu
• Keywords: Emergent Semantics, Internet Technology, Social Annotations, Social Bookmark Service, WWW 2006