Position Paper: Ontology Learning from Folksonomies
D. Benz, and A. Hotho. Workshop Proceedings of Lernen - Wissensentdeckung - Adaptivität (LWA 2007), page 109--112. Halle/Saale, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, (September 2007)
Abstract
The emergence of collaborative tagging systems with their underlying flat and
uncontrolled resource organization paradigm has led to a large number of
research activities focussing on a formal description and analysis of the
resulting "folksonomies". An interesting outcome is that the characteristic
qualities of these systems seem to be inverse to more traditional knowledge
structuring approaches like taxonomies or ontologies: The latter provide rich
and precise semantics, but suffer - amongst others - from a knowledge
acquisition bottleneck. An important step towards exploiting the possible
synergies by bridging the gap between both paradigms is the automatic
extraction of relations between tags in a folksonomy. This position paper
presents preliminary results of ongoing work to induce hierarchical
relationships among tags by analyzing the aggregated data of collaborative
tagging systems as a basis for an ontology learning procedure.