Folksonomies : Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0

One of the defining principles of Web 2.0 when it first emerged was that the collective intelligence of users should be harnessed in order to enrich services for that user community (O’Reilly, 2005). This so-called ‘network effect’ principle remains as central to the Web 2.0 thesis then as it does five years on (O’Reilly and Battelle, 2009). Folksonomies, or collaborative tagging systems, have become the epitome of the network effect; using collective intelligence to organise and retrieve information on the Web. In Folksonomies: indexing and retrieval in Web 2.0, author Isabella Peters explores the use of folksonomies in ‘collaborative information services’, a catch-all term used by Peters to encompass the heterogeneous nature of the Web 2.0 services that use tagging systems. The stated purpose of Folksonomies is to provide a degree of insight into folksonomy applications, as well as discuss their strengths, weaknesses and how their problems can be ameliorated by applying recognised information retrieval models and formal knowledge representation methods

News and Information Media in the Informational Economy: In Search of a Framework for Aesthetic Network Analysis

How can prosumers, crowd-/cloudsourcing and collaborative intelligence form the basis of economically sustainable business models in the short-, medium- and long run? A point of departure is a working title: Aesthetic Network Analysis. Aesthetic experience is a determining factor for so-called Web 2.0 users, also when engaging in such network activities as prosuming and crowdsourcing. A framework for Aesthetic Network Analysis must be developed in order to understand the so-called Enterprise 2.0. Such a framework must be based on the philosophy of the aesthetic experience rooted in Baumgarten\u27s aesthetics, i.e. a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to aesthetics that includes a metaphysical idea of added value

Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System

Netmodern: Interventions in Digital Sociology

The techno-economic grid of the Internet looks set to fulfil its autopoietic potentials as a global and multi-dimensionally immersive knowledge and memory archival network. This research project moves through a series of Digital Sociology case studies that mimic the changes in paradigms of the WWW from 2005-2010 in the forms of Web 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond to augmented reality and the cloud. Netmodern social theory is an emergent and speculative product of the research findings of this thesis and the subjective experiences of the researcher in experiencing and explaining digital realities in the research. All of the case studies employ practice-based approaches of original investigation through digital interventions completely immersed in particular waves of innovation and change. The role of the researcher shifts from administrator to mediator and observer as the very fabric of the social web transforms and evolves. The suggestion of the research findings is that you need to actually look at everything differently in order to study the research objects of emergent social agency and forms in digital media. Existing forms of critical analysis and methodological frameworks, particularly those concerned with conceptual models of media literacy or collective intelligence are insufficient as explanatory methods. Studying media literacy is most concerned with ‘how’ we create and interact in online social life beyond issues of simple accessibility. The focus of collective intelligence research is ‘what’ knowledge is available for interaction and a canvas for relationships between agency and knowledge forms. All of the case studies in this research project speak to and critique the intersections and relationships of emergent social agency and forms prevalent in Digital Sociology. The collective case studies explore online academic communities (BlogScholar), agency and popularity in the Twitter social network (Twae) and a variety of representations of collective intelligence in action (Web 2.0 cases studies). The research results suggest that the Internet is not so much intersecting with as it is being culture, economy, and technology

The Management and Use of Social Network Sites in a Government Department

In this paper we report findings from a study of social network site use in a UK Government department. We have investigated this from a managerial, organisational perspective. We found at the study site that there are already several social network technologies in use, and that these: misalign with and problematize organisational boundaries; blur boundaries between working and social lives; present differing opportunities for control; have different visibilities; have overlapping functionality with each other and with other information technologies; that they evolve and change over time; and that their uptake is conditioned by existing infrastructure and availability. We find the organisational complexity that social technologies are often hoped to cut across is, in reality, something that shapes their uptake and use. We argue the idea of a single, central social network site for supporting cooperative work within an organisation will hit the same problems as any effort of centralisation in organisations. We argue that while there is still plenty of scope for design and innovation in this area, an important challenge now is in supporting organisations in managing what can best be referred to as a social network site 'ecosystem'.Comment: Accepted for publication in JCSCW (The Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work

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