Using Ontologies to Strengthen Folksonomies and Enrich Information Retrieval in Weblogs: Theoretical background and corporate use-case
Alexandre Passant
While free-tagging classification is widely used in social software
implementations and especially in weblogs, it raises various
issues regarding information retrieval. In this paper, we
describe an approach that mixes folksonomies and semantic
web technologies in order to solve some of these problems,
and to enrich information retrieval capabilities among blog
posts.
We first introduce the corporate context of the study and
the issues we have faced that motivated our approach. Then,
we argue how the use of domain ontologies combined with the
SIOC vocabulary on the top of an existing folksonomy and
weblogging platform offers a way to get rid of free-tagging
classification flaws, and enhances information retrieval by
suggesting related blog posts.
Aside of the theoretical background, this paper also focuses
on implementation. We present experimental results
of this approach through the example of add-ons to a corporate
blogging platform and the associated semantic web
search engine, that extensively uses RDF and other semantic
web technologies to find appropriate information and suggest
related posts.
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