Pragmatic evaluation of folksonomies

Recently, a number of algorithms have been proposed to obtain hierarchical structures — so-called folksonomies — from social tagging data. Work on these algorithms is in part driven by a belief that folksonomies are useful for tasks such as: (a) Navigating social tagging systems and (b) Acquiring semantic relationships between tags. While the promises and pitfalls of the latter have been studied to some extent, we know very little about the extent to which folksonomies are pragmatically useful for navigating social tagging systems. This paper sets out to address this gap by presenting and applying a pragmatic framework for evaluating folksonomies. We model exploratory navigation of a tagging system as decentralized search on a network of tags. Evaluation is based on the fact that the performance of a decentralized search algorithm depends on the quality of the background knowledge used. The key idea of our approach is to use hierarchical structures learned by folksonomy algorithms...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Denis Helic, Markus Strohmaier, Christoph Trattner, Markus Muhr, Kristina Lerman
• Keywords: Algorithms, Internet Technology, Social Tagging, Social Tagging Systems, WWW 2011