Social Tagging Systems are web applications in which users upload resources (e.g., bookmarks, videos, photos, etc.) and annotate it with a list of freely chosen keywords called tags. This is a grassroots approach to organize a site and help users to find the resources they are interested in. Social tagging systems are open and inherently social; features that have been proven to encourage participation. However, with the large popularity of these systems and the increasing amount of user-contributed content, information overload rapidly becomes an issue. Recommender Systems are well known applications for increasing the level of relevant content over the “noise” that continuously grows as more and more content becomes available online. In social tagging systems, however, we face new challenges. While in classic recommender systems the mode of recommendation is basically the resource, in social tagging systems there are three possible modes of recommendation: users, resources, or tags. Therefore suitable methods that properly exploit the different dimensions of social tagging systems data are needed. In this book, we survey the most recent and state-of-the-art work about a whole new generation of recommender systems built to serve social tagging systems. The book is divided into self-contained chapters covering the background material on social tagging systems and recommender systems to the more advanced techniques like the ones based on tensor factorization and graph-based models.

Originally introduced by social bookmarking systems, collaborative tagging, or social tagging, has been widely adopted by many web-based systems like wikis, e-commerce platforms, or social networks. Collaborative tagging systems allow users to annotate resources using freely chosen keywords, so called tags . Those tags help users in finding/retrieving resources, discovering new resources, and navigating through the system. The process of tagging resources is laborious. Therefore, most systems support their users by tag recommender components that recommend tags in a personalized way. The Discovery Challenges 2008 and 2009 of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) tackled the problem of tag recommendations in collaborative tagging systems. Researchers were invited to test their methods in a competition on datasets from the social bookmark and publication sharing system BibSonomy. Moreover, the 2009 challenge included an online task where the recommender systems were integrated into BibSonomy and provided recommendations in real time. In this chapter we review, evaluate and summarize the submissions to the two Discovery Challenges and thus lay the groundwork for continuing research in this area.

Social bookmarking systems allow users to store links to internet resources on a web page. As social bookmarking systems are growing in popularity, search algorithms have been developed that transfer the idea of link-based rankings in the Web to a social bookmarking system’s data structure. These rankings differ from traditional search engine rankings in that they incorporate the rating of users. In this study, we compare search in social bookmarking systems with traditionalWeb search. In the first part, we compare the user activity and behaviour in both kinds of systems, as well as the overlap of the underlying sets of URLs. In the second part,we compare graph-based and vector space rankings for social bookmarking systems with commercial search engine rankings. Our experiments are performed on data of the social bookmarking system Del.icio.us and on rankings and log data from Google, MSN, and AOL. We will show that part of the difference between the systems is due to different behaviour (e. g., the concatenation of multi-word lexems to single terms in Del.icio.us), and that real-world events may trigger similar behaviour in both kinds of systems. We will also show that a graph-based ranking approach on folksonomies yields results that are closer to the rankings of the commercial search engines than vector space retrieval, and that the correlation is high in particular for the domains that are well covered by the social bookmarking system.

Social bookmarking systems constitute an established part of the Web 2.0. In such systems users describe bookmarks by keywords called tags. The structure behind these social systems, called folksonomies, can be viewed as a tripartite hypergraph of user, tag and resource nodes. This underlying network shows specific structural properties that explain its growth and the possibility of serendipitous exploration. Today’s search engines represent the gateway to retrieve information from the World Wide Web. Short queries typically consisting of two to three words describe a user’s information need. In response to the displayed results of the search engine, users click on the links of the result page as they expect the answer to be of relevance. This clickdata can be represented as a folksonomy in which queries are descriptions of clicked URLs. The resulting network structure, which we will term logsonomy is very similar to the one of folksonomies. In order to find out about its properties, we analyze the topological characteristics of the tripartite hypergraph of queries, users and bookmarks on a large snapshot of del.icio.us and on query logs of two large search engines. All of the three datasets show small world properties. The tagging behavior of users, which is explained by preferential attachment of the tags in social bookmark systems, is reflected in the distribution of single query words in search engines. We can conclude that the clicking behaviour of search engine users based on the displayed search results and the tagging behaviour of social bookmarking users is driven by similar dynamics.

Currently, social bookmarking systems provide intuitive support for browsing locally their content. A global view is usually presented by the tag cloud of the system, but it does not allow a conceptual drill-down, e. g., along a conceptual hierarchy. In this paper, we present a clustering approach for computing such a conceptual hierarchy for a given folksonomy. The hierarchy is complemented with ranked lists of users and resources most related to each cluster. The rankings are computed using our FolkRank algorithm. We have evaluated our approach on large scale data from the del.icio.us bookmarking system.

BibSonomy is a web-based social resource sharing system which allows users to organise and share bookmarks and publications in a collaborative manner. In this paper we present the system, followed by a description of the insights in the structure of its bibliographic data that we gained by applying techniques we developed in the area of Formal Concept Analysis.

Social bookmark tools are rapidly emerging on the Web. In such systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. The reason for their immediate success is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating. In this paper we specify a formal model for folksonomies and briefly describe our own system BibSonomy, which allows for sharing both bookmarks and publication references in a kind of personal library.