Using Ontologies to Strengthen Folksonomies and Enrich Information Retrieval in Weblogs: Theoretical background and corporate use-case

While free-tagging classification is widely used in social software implementations and especially in weblogs, it raises various issues regarding information retrieval. In this paper, we describe an approach that mixes folksonomies and semantic web technologies in order to solve some of these problems, and to enrich information retrieval capabilities among blog posts. We first introduce the corporate context of the study and the issues we have faced that motivated our approach. Then, we argue how the use of domain ontologies combined with the SIOC vocabulary on the top of an existing folksonomy and weblogging platform offers a way to get rid of free-tagging classification flaws, and enhances information retrieval by suggesting related blog posts. Aside of the theoretical background, this paper also focuses on implementation. We present experimental results of this approach through the example of add-ons to a corporate blogging platform and the associated semantic web search engine, that extensively uses RDF and other semantic web technologies to find appropriate information and suggest related posts.