Understanding the Semantics of Ambiguous Tags in Folksonomies

The use of tags to describe Web resources in a collaborative manner has experienced rising popularity among Web users in recent years. The product of such activity is given the name folksonomy, which can be considered as a scheme of organizing information in the users’ own way. In this paper, we present a possible way to analyze the tripartite graphs – graphs involving users, tags and resources – of folksonomies and discuss how these elements acquire their meanings through their associations with other elements, a process we call mutual contextualization. In particular, we demonstrate how different meanings of ambiguous tags can be discovered through such analysis of the tripartite graph by studying the tag sf. We also discuss how the result can be used as a basis to better understand the nature of folksonomies.