Webology, Volume 4, Number 2, June, 2007 |
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The Web consists of diverse information collections in terms of the type of content, context, format and quality. However, this diversity, as good as it is, often brings challenges for users in their web information seeking activities. The technologies such as wiki, blog, RSS, and folksonomy that build Web 2.0 present an opportunity to share knowledge and facilitate interactions between users and computers. One of the main challenges of Web 1.0 was that users were not engaged in information organization. Currently folksonomy-based systems (e.g., Del.icio.us) engage users in bookmarking and introducing their favorites.
A folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as web resources, online photographs and web links, using open-ended labels called tags. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging (Folksonomy, 2007). Tags help to improve search engine effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary.
Folksonomy, a free-form tagging, is a user-generated classification system of web contents that allows users to tag their favorite web resources with their chosen words or phrases selected from natural language. These tags (also called concepts, categories, facets or entities) can be used to classify web resources and to express users' preferences (Noruzi, 2006). Folksonomy is a classification of the users, by the users and for the users. The most popular, widely used folksonomy-based systems are:
The purpose of this note is to answer the following question: what can a thesaurus do for a folksonomy-based system? Properly developed and used, a thesaurus can play several roles:
A folksonomy-based system should use a thesaurus:
It should be noted that not everyone agrees on the need for a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus in folksonomy-based systems. However, there is no way to maintain consistency over time or across folksonomy users without a thesaurus. An additional folksonomy problem arises when dealing with foreign languages. It is obvious that different languages, such as Chinese, Persian, Arabic, German, and French use different words. Moreover, within any given language, different fields use differing vocabularies.
In folksonomy-based systems, there are at least two vocabularies: (i) the users' vocabularies; and (ii) the searchers' vocabularies. Thus, there is a possibility of mismatch in any transition between vocabularies, a dissonance in meaning. If the searcher asks for A and the user tags B, they might be expressing the same meaning in different ways (synonyms), or they might both write A and be meaning different things (homographs) (Buckland, 1999). A folksonomy-based system should control the use of synonyms and homonyms through the use of preferred terms. It should be able to relate synonyms and suggest a preferred option, popular synonym.
Language is hardly a precise method of communication. Often, a concept can be expressed in a multitude of different ways (e.g. "retrieve," "search," or "query"), and unless there is some mechanism to recognize them as pointing to the same concept, interpretation of words to their intended meaning can be rather difficult. In order to reduce such ambiguity in interpretation, some IR systems employ the use of "controlled vocabulary", a set of agreed-on terms that represent specific concepts, thereby reducing the number of possible values for meaning. Controlled vocabulary can be used to generate a list of preferred terms as tags representing key concepts of documents (Yang, 2005).
The other question which needs to be answered is: when does a folksonomy-based system need a thesaurus?
Four main problems of folksonomy tagging are plurals, polysemy, synonymy, and depth (specificity) of tagging.
Plurals: Plurals and parts of speech and spelling can undermine a tagging system. For example, if tags Cat and Cats are distinct, then a query for one will not retrieve both, unless the intelligent search system has the capability to perform such replacements built into it.
Polysemy: Polysemy refers to a word that has two or more similar meanings. "Poly" means 'many', and "semy" means 'meanings'.
Synonymy: Synonymy, different words with similar or identical meanings, presents a greater problem for tagging systems because inconsistency among the terms used in tagging can make it very difficult for a searcher to be sure that all the relevant items have been found.
Depth (specificity) of tagging: Specificity means how specific should the user (classifier) be in translating a concept into tag(s)? Web resources can be tagged to varying levels of specificity, from very broad subjects taken only from the title and abstract to the paragraph level. The depth of tags refers to how many tags there are, relative to a web resource in the system.
In library classification systems (e.g., Dewey Decimal Classification: DDC, and Library of Congress Classification: LCC), each book is in one unambiguous category which is in turn within a yet more general one. For example, Lions and Tigers fall in the genus Panthera, and domestic Cats in the genus Felis, but Panthera and Felis are both part of family Felidae, of which Lions, Tigers and Domestic Cats are all part. Similarly, books on Asia's geography are in the Dewey Decimal system category 915 and books on General history of Asia Iran's in 955, but both are subsumed by the 900 category, covering all topics in geography and history.
A library classification system assumes that for any new book, its logical place already exists within the system, even before the book was published (Shirky, 2005). In contrast, folksonomy tagging is neither exclusive nor hierarchical and therefore can in some circumstances have both advantages and disadvantages compared with hierarchical taxonomies.
In library classifications, a book can be about several things at once. But the physical fact of the book has to be in one place, and if it is in one place, it cannot also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents. In folksonomy-based systems, there is no physical constraint that is forcing this kind of organization on users any longer. It is perfectly possible for any number of links to be in any number of places in a hierarchy, or in many hierarchies, or in no hierarchy at all (Shirky, 2005). Folksonomy, a user-generated classification, is in neither alphabetical nor hierarchical order. However, Del.icio.us gives each user an option to create hierarchy in their personal tags or to alphabetize their tags.
Folksonomy is a bottom-up approach where users themselves join the classification, compared to top-down taxonomy and library classifications. By this nature, folksonomy classification can reflect users' actual interest in real time (Niwa et al., 2006). In contrast to hierarchical library classifications (e.g., DDC or LCC) and thesauri, there is usually no limit for choice of tags in folksonomy; so many similar tags are generated. For instance, user A puts tag "mathematics" to a mathematical document, and user B puts tag "math" to the same document. Other examples: Plane (airplane), exam (examination), lab (laboratory), vet (veterinary surgeon), photo (photograph), fridge (refrigerator), phone (telephone), fax (facsimile), ad (advertisement), etc. This happens very often in folksonomy tagging, and is called "tag redundancy in folksonomy" (Niwa et al., 2006). Thus, there is no "authority control" on folksonomy entries.
Folksonomy-based systems can employ optional authority control of subject keywords, place, personal or corporate names and resource titles by connecting the system to established authority control files or controlled vocabularies using new techniques. A folksonomy-based system needs a controlled vocabulary and a suggestion-based system. Guy and Tonkin (2006) propose various system specific strategies for improving the quality of tags (e.g., spelling error checking, suggestion of synonyms, etc.) and encouraging users to observe certain collaborative tagging conventions (Macgregor & McCulloch, 2006).
Since the objectives of folksonomy are: (a) to make the process of saving and sharing links (URLs) as simple as possible; and (b) to let users easily share links (web resources) with all users throughout the world, a controlled vocabulary for a folksonomy-based system is essential to ensure tagging consistency across the database and between taggers. This may be a thesaurus or subject headings. By controlling the vocabulary using a thesaurus, tags are standardized and related resources are collocated for ease of discovery by the end-user (Lancaster, 1979). However, as Mika (2005) argues, it is not always possible for folksonomy users to express a complex concept with a single keyword and thus they may use more than one tag to express the concepts associated with a given item. The more tags available for a web resource, the better a folksonomy-based system can function.
In the future, it should be possible for search engine designers to design folksonomy-based engines with controlled vocabularies in different fields to improve web information retrieval.
For this issue, we have four papers. Two papers deal with concepts related to "Web 2.0" and the last two papers deal with "use of web" and "ontology servers."
William F. Birdsall: Web 2.0 as a social movement. The study discusses Web 2.0 development and communications rights. Web 2.0 technologies try to find new ways to facilitate communication, collaboration, interaction and knowledge sharing between Internet users. In this study, the social movement for a right to communicate and the discourse surrounding Web 2.0 development are compared to demonstrate how Web 2.0 is a manifestation of an ongoing interaction between this human rights social movement and communication technology. This study concludes with a discussion on how a right to communicate serves as a conceptual framework for addressing a range of public policy issues arising out of the increasing use of the Web and as a framework for Web research and development. It is concluded that Web 2.0 development can be seen as part of a larger human rights movement.
Louise F. Spiteri: Structure and form of folksonomy tags: The road to the public library catalogue. This study examines how the tags that constitute folksonomies are structured. It is argued that folksonomies have the potential to add much value to public library catalogues by enabling clients to: store, maintain, and organize items of interest in the catalogue using their own tags. In this study, tags were acquired over a thirty-day period from the daily tag logs of three folksonomy sites: Del.icio.us, Furl, and Technorati. The tags were evaluated against section 6 (choice and form of terms) of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) guidelines for the construction of controlled vocabularies. It is revealed that the folksonomy tags correspond closely to the NISO guidelines that pertain to the types of concepts expressed by the tags, the predominance of single tags, the predominance of nouns, and the use of recognized spelling.
Wendy Aitken: Use of Web in Tertiary Research and Education. This study discusses the role of ICT among members of the world's oldest living culture, the Australian Aborigines, now officially called Indigenous Australians. Initially, students of Aboriginal Studies were discouraged from using the Web, on the grounds that they lacked experience in judging the reliability of academic sources. In recent times, this has changed dramatically in educational practice. In addition, Aboriginal communities are now fully embracing the Web with production of their own web sites for a variety of reasons, generally to share their unique knowledge and culture with the world (it is surprising how often you can hear the strangely earthy and haunting sound of the didgeridoo in the score of European orchestral music). In addition, they are using the Web to tell their story, including that of how the Pitjantjatjara people were moved from their country to make way for British nuclear tests in the 1940s. Other discussions concerned the appropriateness of the Noble Savage myth, and comparisons with Canada's indigenous/aboriginal people.
Mohammad Nazir Ahmad & Robert M. Colomb: Overview of ontology servers research. This study defines ontology as a complex information object, containing millions of concepts in complex relationships. If we want to manage complex information objects (i.e., ontologies), we need an information system called an "ontology server", "ontology repository" or "server repository." The ontology server is a tool that supports editing, browsing and creation of ontologies. The ontology server should be capable of mapping objects/ontologies/terms, relationships between terms and attributes associated with the terms. This study reviews and compares the main ontology servers that have been reported in the literatures. This review reports the current technologies of ontology and the semantic web, particularly on ontology server development.