Community-Driven Ontology Evolution Based on Folksonomies

The Semantic Web mission is to enable a better organization of the Web content to improve the searching, navigation and integration of the available information. Although the Semantic Web is intended for machines, the process of creating and maintaining it is a social one: only people, for example, have necessary skills to create and maintain ontologies. While most existing ontologies are designed by single individuals or small groups of experts, actual ontology users are not involved in the development process. Such an individual approach in creating ontologies, lead to a weak community grounding. On the other hand, Social Software is becoming increasingly popular among web users, giving opportunities to exploit the potential of collaboration within a community. Tools like wikis and folksonomies allow users to easily create new content and share contributions over a social network. Social Software tools can go beyond their current limits, by exploiting the power provided by semantic technologies. Conversely, Semantic Web tools can benefit from the ability of Social Software in fostering collaboration among users, by lowering entry barriers. In this paper we propose a new approach for ontology evolution, considering collaborative tagging systems as an opportunity to complement classic approaches used in maintaining ontologie

Fostering knowledge evolution through community-based participation

The ontology development process is typically led by single or small groups of experts, with users mostly playing a passive role. Such an elitist approach in building ontologies hinders the primary purpose of large-scale knowledge sharing. Collaborative tagging systems have emerged as a new web annotation method proving appealing features in fostering users to collaboratively organize information through their own metadata. Collaborative tagging shifts the creation of metadata for indexing web resources, from an individual professional activity to a collective endeavor, where every user is a potential contributor. In this paper we introduce an approach to knowledge evolution which aims to exploit the ability of collaborative tagging in fostering community members participation to move forward an initial knowledge structure. We present user scenarios about how subscribers of a scientific digital library might play the role of knowledge organizers through personal organization and sharing of citations of interest

Towards social semantic suggestive tagging

The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by online communities whose members share a common interest in classifying different types of information for a later retrieval. Collaborative tagging systems allow people to organize a set of resources of interest through unconstrained annotations based on free keywords commonly named tags. Suggestive tagging techniques support users in this organization process and have shown to be helpful also in fostering a quick convergence to a shared tag vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a tag recommender which relies on the content analysis of the resource to be tagged, as well as on the personal and collective tagging history. The main contribution of this work is a model which combines semantic content analysis methods with existing suggestive tagging techniques. The expected benefit is the improvement of the user experience in social bookmarking systems, and more generally in collaborative tagging systems

Embedding Social Networking Information into Jazz to Foster Group Awareness within Distributed Teams

A Collaborative Development Environments (CDE) provides a project workspace with a standardized toolset to help distributed development teams cope with geographical distance. However, there is a lack of support to reduce socio-cultural distance, which poses practical barriers to the development of connections and shared context/culture between team members. The rise of the Social Web has created several opportunities to publish personal information, often further composed through Web mashups, which can be regarded as a valuable data source in order to establish a shared context among remote developers, with little or no chances to meet. In this paper we present our preliminary work that aims to provide distributed software teams with overall, contextual awareness aggregated in one place. Using the IBM Jazz as CDE, which already provides both presence and workspace awareness, we leveraged the FriendFeed aggregator service to embed personal information about distributed co-workers, collected from social networks. Disseminating additional group awareness information to developers, who have little or no chances to meet, can help to speed up the establishment of organizational values, attitudes, and trust-based inter-personal connections