Collaborative tagging systems---systems where many casual users annotate objects with free-form strings (tags) of their choosing---have recently emerged as a powerful way to label and organize large collections of data. During our recent investigation into these types of systems, we discovered a simple but remarkably effective algorithm for converting a large corpus of tags annotating objects in a tagging system into a navigable hierarchical taxonomy of tags. We first discuss the algorithm and then present a preliminary model to explain why it is so effective in these types of systems.

Social tagging systems have recently became very popular as a means to classify large sets of resources shared among on-line communities over the social Web. However, the folksonomies resulting from the use of these systems revealed limitations : tags are ambiguous and their spelling may vary, and folksonomies are difficult to exploit in order to retrieve or exchange information. This article compares the recent attempts to overcome these limitations and to support the use of folksonomies with formal languages and ontologies from the Semantic Web.

Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks. This article provides a comprehensive description of this work. It focuses on research that extracts and makes use of the concepts, relations, facts and descriptions found in Wikipedia, and organizes the work into four broad categories: applying Wikipedia to natural language processing; using it to facilitate information retrieval and information extraction; and as a resource for ontology building. The article addresses how Wikipedia is being used as is, how it is being improved and adapted, and how it is being combined with other structures to create entirely new resources. We identify the research groups and individuals involved, and how their work has developed in the last few years. We provide a comprehensive list of the open-source software they have produced. We also discuss the implications of this work for the long-awaited semantic web.

Abstract  Ontology is one of the fundamental cornerstones of the semantic Web. The pervasive use of ontologies in information sharing and knowledge management calls for efficient and effective approaches to ontology development. Ontology learning, which seeksto discover ontological knowledge from various forms of data automatically or semi-automatically, can overcome the bottleneckof ontology acquisition in ontology development. Despite the significant progress in ontology learning research over the pastdecade, there remain a number of open problems in this field. This paper provides a comprehensive review and discussion ofmajor issues, challenges, and opportunities in ontology learning. We propose a new learning-oriented model for ontology developmentand a framework for ontology learning. Moreover, we identify and discuss important dimensions for classifying ontology learningapproaches and techniques. In light of the impact of domain on choosing ontology learning approaches, we summarize domaincharacteristics that can facilitate future ontology learning effort. The paper offers a road map and a variety of insightsabout this fast-growing field.