Monday , 7 November 2005 W 8 : Semantic Network

This paper delivers a case study on the properties of metadata provided by a folksonomy. We provide the background about folksonomies and discuss to which extend the process of creating meta-data in a folksonomy is related to the idea of emergent semantics as defined by the IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Data Semantics. We conduct experiments to analyse the meta-data provided by the del.icio.us folksonomy and to develop a method for selecting subsets of meta-data that adhere to the principle of interest-based locality, which was originally observed in peer-to-peer environments. In addition, we compare data provided by del.icio.us to data provided by the DMOZ taxonomy.