The Semantics of Folksonomies: The Meaning in Social Tagging

In this document we review some key observations about the use of naive user tagging in organizing electronic resources, and the possible advantages they display over rigid classification. We report on aggregated views of communal tags and review arguments concerning the relationship between folksonomy (the emergent process of communal classification) and formal ontology, rejecting the strong view that faces them against each other as opposing solutions. Finally we present a novel framework for abstracting latent structures in folksonomic categorization in a way that facilitates their conversion to formal ontologies. This should enhance their usefulness in integrating resources from different sources.