Creating structure from disorder: using folksonomies to create semantic metadata

This paper reports on an on-going research project to create educational semantic metadata out of folksonomies. The paper describes a simple scenario for the usage of the generated semantic metadata in teaching, and describes the ‘FolksAnnotation’ tool which applies an organization scheme to tags in a specific domain of interest. The contribution of this paper is to describe an evaluation framework which will allow us to validate our claim that folksonomies are potentially a rich source of metadata

The state of research on folksonomies in the field of Library and Information Science : a Systematic Literature Review

Purpose – The purpose of this thesis is to provide an overview of all relevant peer-reviewed articles on folksonomies, social tagging and social bookmarking as knowledge organisation systems within the field of Library and Information Science by reviewing the current state of research on these systems of managing knowledge. Method – I use the systematic literature review method in order to systematically and transparently review and synthesise data extracted from 39 articles found through the discovery system LUBsearch in order to find out which, and to which degree different methods, theories and systems are represented, which subfields can be distinguished, how present research within these subfields is and which larger conclusions can be drawn from research conducted between 2003-2013 on folksonomies. Findings – There have been done many studies which are exploratory or reviewing literature discussions, and other frequently used methods which have been used are questionnaires or surveys, although often in conjunction with other methods. Furthermore, out of the 39 studies, 22 were quantitative, 15 were qualitative and 2 used mixed methods. I also found that there were an underwhelming number of theories being explicitly used, where merely 11 articles explicitly used theories, and only one theory was used twice. No key authors on the topic were identified, though Knowledge Organization, Information Processing & Management and Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology were recognised as key journals for research on folksonomies. There have been plenty of studies on how tags and folksonomies have effected other knowledge organisation systems, or how pre-existing have been used to create new systems. Other well represented subfields include studies on the quality or characteristics of tags or text, and studies aiming to improve folksonomies, search methods or tags. Value – I provide an overview on what has been researched and where the focus on said research has been during the last decade and present future research suggestions and identify possible dangers to be wary of which I argue will benefit folksonomies and knowledge organisation as a whole

Data and Metadata: Externalizing the Inner TCBOK

Brief Description: The Technical Communication Body of Knowledge (TCBOK) is a landmark project by the Society of Technical Communication (STC) to establish a body of disciplinary knowledge for technical communicators. The initiative has its roots in connecting academics and practitioners and professionalizing technical communication (TC). Purpose: This report is aimed at infrastructural inversion – a way of externalizing the architecture and organization of the TCBOK classification system. Infrastructural inversion can help us find problems that are obscured from the surface and see existing problems with clear eyes. Method: This article focuses primarily on the practical politics, materiality and texture, indeterminacy of knowledge, and ubiquity of the controlled systems that are intrinsic in the TCBOK (Bowker and Star, 1999). Results: The TCBOK reflects the concurrent political and ethical environment of both the society and the profession. Decisions regarding the TCBOK design and development can support communities of practice that work toward professional consciousness and the professional status of TC. The TCBOK provides a place to negotiate that professional consciousness through user-mediation. Conclusion: The TCBOK allows the STC to govern the profession of TC. The core elements of the TCBOK, its strongest premises, validate or reject discourse through social elitism. This governing isn’t necessarily bad, but it can be dangerous. A body of knowledge without governance risks unruliness. Over-governance risks professional inequality through exclusion. Viewing the structure of a controlled system through a critical lens can identify overlooked problems, improve meta-cognition through methodology, and establish a vocabulary for critical analysis through metaphor and genre

An open annotation ontology for science on web 3.0

Background: There is currently a gap between the rich and expressive collection of published biomedical ontologies, and the natural language expression of biomedical papers consumed on a daily basis by scientific researchers. The purpose of this paper is to provide an open, shareable structure for dynamic integration of biomedical domain ontologies with the scientific document, in the form of an Annotation Ontology (AO), thus closing this gap and enabling application of formal biomedical ontologies directly to the literature as it emerges. Methods: Initial requirements for AO were elicited by analysis of integration needs between biomedical web communities, and of needs for representing and integrating results of biomedical text mining. Analysis of strengths and weaknesses of previous efforts in this area was also performed. A series of increasingly refined annotation tools were then developed along with a metadata model in OWL, and deployed for feedback and additional requirements the ontology to users at a major pharmaceutical company and a major academic center. Further requirements and critiques of the model were also elicited through discussions with many colleagues and incorporated into the work. Results: This paper presents Annotation Ontology (AO), an open ontology in OWL-DL for annotating scientific documents on the web. AO supports both human and algorithmic content annotation. It enables "stand-off" or independent metadata anchored to specific positions in a web document by any one of several methods. In AO, the document may be annotated but is not required to be under update control of the annotator. AO contains a provenance model to support versioning, and a set model for specifying groups and containers of annotation. AO is freely available under open source license at http://purl.org/ao/, and extensive documentation including screencasts is available on AO's Google Code page: http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/. Conclusions: The Annotation Ontology meets critical requirements for an open, freely shareable model in OWL, of annotation metadata created against scientific documents on the Web. We believe AO can become a very useful common model for annotation metadata on Web documents, and will enable biomedical domain ontologies to be used quite widely to annotate the scientific literature. Potential collaborators and those with new relevant use cases are invited to contact the authors

Complex adaptive systems based data integration : theory and applications

Data Definition Languages (DDLs) have been created and used to represent data in programming languages and in database dictionaries. This representation includes descriptions in the form of data fields and relations in the form of a hierarchy, with the common exception of relational databases where relations are flat. Network computing created an environment that enables relatively easy and inexpensive exchange of data. What followed was the creation of new DDLs claiming better support for automatic data integration. It is uncertain from the literature if any real progress has been made toward achieving an ideal state or limit condition of automatic data integration. This research asserts that difficulties in accomplishing integration are indicative of socio-cultural systems in general and are caused by some measurable attributes common in DDLs. This research’s main contributions are: (1) a theory of data integration requirements to fully support automatic data integration from autonomous heterogeneous data sources; (2) the identification of measurable related abstract attributes (Variety, Tension, and Entropy); (3) the development of tools to measure them. The research uses a multi-theoretic lens to define and articulate these attributes and their measurements. The proposed theory is founded on the Law of Requisite Variety, Information Theory, Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory, Sowa’s Meaning Preservation framework and Zipf distributions of words and meanings. Using the theory, the attributes, and their measures, this research proposes a framework for objectively evaluating the suitability of any data definition language with respect to degrees of automatic data integration. This research uses thirteen data structures constructed with various DDLs from the 1960\u27s to date. No DDL examined (and therefore no DDL similar to those examined) is designed to satisfy the law of requisite variety. No DDL examined is designed to support CAS evolutionary processes that could result in fully automated integration of heterogeneous data sources. There is no significant difference in measures of Variety, Tension, and Entropy among DDLs investigated in this research. A direction to overcome the common limitations discovered in this research is suggested and tested by proposing GlossoMote, a theoretical mathematically sound description language that satisfies the data integration theory requirements. The DDL, named GlossoMote, is not merely a new syntax, it is a drastic departure from existing DDL constructs. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated with a small scale experiment and evaluated using the proposed assessment framework and other means. The promising results require additional research to evaluate GlossoMote’s approach commercial use potential

User modeling for exploratory search on the Social Web. Exploiting social bookmarking systems for user model extraction, evaluation and integration

Exploratory search is an information seeking strategy that extends be- yond the query-and-response paradigm of traditional Information Retrieval models. Users browse through information to discover novel content and to learn more about the newly discovered things. Social bookmarking systems integrate well with exploratory search, because they allow one to search, browse, and filter social bookmarks. Our contribution is an exploratory tag search engine that merges social bookmarking with exploratory search. For this purpose, we have applied collaborative filtering to recommend tags to users. User models are an im- portant prerequisite for recommender systems. We have produced a method to algorithmically extract user models from folksonomies, and an evaluation method to measure the viability of these user models for exploratory search. According to our evaluation web-scale user modeling, which integrates user models from various services across the Social Web, can improve exploratory search. Within this thesis we also provide a method for user model integra- tion. Our exploratory tag search engine implements the findings of our user model extraction, evaluation, and integration methods. It facilitates ex- ploratory search on social bookmarks from Delicious and Connotea and pub- lishes extracted user models as Linked Data

Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence

Challenges of the Implementation of Folksonomy in Library Software of Iran

Objective: The purpose of this study is the feasibility of applying tagging and categorizing people (Folksonomy) in library software of Iran. By using folksonomy services, libraries can take an important step in accelerating the process of provision and disseminating information and by using user-oriented participatory methods they can convert libraries and informational centers to dynamic and user-oriented organizations. Therefore this study deals with the feasibility of applying tagging and categorizing people (folksonomy) in existing library software of Iranian universities and reviews the fields of design and creation of user and folksonomy oriented libraries. Methodology: Research methodology is survey, descriptive and comparative. And the statistical population of this study consists of common library software in Iranian universities including three comprehensive software of Simorgh (product of Nosa Company), DJ LIB Pars Azarakhsh (product of Pars Azarakhsh Company), and Sana (product of Payam Mashregh Company). In descriptive section, data and preliminary data collection tools have investigated 41 items of the feasibility capabilities of implementation of folksonomy in the library software by using a checklist that includes 5 indicators (including the need for creation and implementation, application and development, support and librarian functions) and 25 checklist were distributed between managers and staff of information centers and university libraries, library software engineers and programmers and the results were reviewed. And for this purpose the survey, analysis and comparative research methods were used and after the data collection, the data analysis was conducted in accordance with the research questions. Findings: Study findings determined that Sana Library Software has got the highest score at index of: 1. measures required for folksonomy; 2. strategies and implementation of Folksonomy; 3. ability to run and develop folksonomy in the library software; 4. the tasks of librarians in providing services by utilizing folksonomy capabilities and Pars Azarakhsh Digital Library Software has acquired the highest rating at index; and 5. updated supports of Folksonomy in library software. Conclusion: On the basis of these findings, it is concluded that Sana (product of Payam Mashregh Company) has achieved significant progress in creating appropriate infrastructure for implementation of folksonomy and Pars Azarakhsh software progress is not considerable and the comprehensive software of Simorgh, at the last ranking, has not created an appropriate infrastructure for implementation and it is far from reaching such facilities and the goal. Finally, guidelines and recommendations derived from the study for infrastructure of software has been provided