Enhancing Subjective Ontologies with Social Tagging Systems

Social computing websites provide a framework for users to submit (and discuss) content, while often providing a user created categorization system, dubbed folksonomies. Additionally users may have the ability to specify friends (and foes) within the social network, populated by registered users of the social website. Integrating folksonomies with ontologies provides the ability to capture the semantic relationships between terms. This allows for greater reasoning to refine searches. Most categorisation for social computing is currently achieved by a meta-tagging system dubbed folksonomies, which fails to take into consideration the semantics that occur between terms. By integrating social networks with an ontology we aim to provide mechanisms to capture agreement in opinions and to capture and enhance the semantics of the social network, allowing for greater reasoning to refine searches.