Social bookmarking systems and their emergent information structures, known as folksonomies, are increasingly important data sources for Semantic Web applications. A key question for harvesting semantics from these systems is how to extend and adapt traditional notions of similarity to folksonomies, and which measures are best suited for applications such as navigation support, semantic search, and ontology learning. Here we build an evaluation framework to compare various general folksonomy-based similarity measures derived from established information-theoretic, statistical, and practical measures. Our framework deals generally and symmetrically with users, tags, and resources. For evaluation purposes we focus on similarity among tags and resources, considering different ways to aggregate annotations across users. After comparing how tag similarity measures predict user-created tag relations, we provide an external grounding by user-validated semantic proxies based on WordNet and the Open Directory. We also investigate the issue of scalability. We find that mutual information with distributional micro-aggregation across users yields the highest accuracy, but is not scalable; per-user projection with collaborative aggregation provides the best scalable approach via incremental computations. The results are consistent across resource and tag similarity.
A. Hotho, R. Jäschke, C. Schmitz, and G. Stumme. Informatik 2006 -- Informatik für Menschen. Band 2, volume P-94 of Lecture Notes in Informatics, Bonn, Gesellschaft für Informatik, (October 2006)Proc. Workshop on Applications of Semantic Technologies, Informatik 2006.
C. Cattuto, D. Benz, A. Hotho, and G. Stumme. The Semantic Web -- ISWC 2008, Proc.Intl. Semantic Web Conference 2008, volume 5318 of LNAI, page 615--631. Heidelberg, Springer, (2008)
C. Cattuto, D. Benz, A. Hotho, and G. Stumme. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population (OLP3), page 39--43. Patras, Greece, (July 2008)ISBN 978-960-89282-6-8.
D. Benz, B. Krause, G. Kumar, A. Hotho, and G. Stumme. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Explorative Analytics of Information Networks (EIN2009), Bled, Slovenia, (September 2009)
K. Bade, and D. Benz. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the German Classification Society - Advances in Data Analysis, Data Handling and Business Intelligence (GfKl 2008), Berlin-Heidelberg, Springer, (2008)in press.
D. Benz, K. Tso, and L. Schmidt-Thieme. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop in Innovations in Web Infrastructure (IWI2) at WWW2006, Edinburgh, Scotland, (May 2006)isbn = 085432853X.
D. Benz, K. Tso, and L. Schmidt-Thieme. Special Issue of the Computer Networks journal on Innovations in Web Communications Infrastructure, 51 (16):
4574--4585(2007)
B. Krause, A. Hotho, and G. Stumme. 30th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2008, volume 4956 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 101-113. Glasgow, UK, Springer, (April 2008)