X. Wu, L. Zhang, and Y. Yu. WWW '06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, page 417--426. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (2006)
In order to obtain a machine understandable semantics for web resources, research on the Semantic Web tries to an- notate web resources with concepts and relations from ex- plicitly de¯ned formal ontologies. This kind of formal an- notation is usually done manually or semi-automatically. In this paper, we explore a complement approach that focuses on the \social annotations of the web" which are annota- tions manually made by normal web users without a pre- de¯ned formal ontology. Compared to the formal annota- tions, although social annotations are coarse-grained, infor- mal and vague, they are also more accessible to more peo- ple and better re°ect the web resources' meaning from the users' point of views during their actual usage of the web re- sources. Using a social bookmark service as an example, we show how emergent semantics 2 can be statistically derived from the social annotations. Furthermore, we apply the de- rived emergent semantics to discover and search shared web bookmarks. The initial evaluation on our implementation shows that our method can e®ectively discover semantically related web bookmarks that current social bookmark service can not discover easily.
