TaxoFolk: A hybrid taxonomy - folksonomy classification for enhanced knowledge navigation

Taxonomy is widely used in many of the website and directory navigation schemes for content/knowledge retrieval. However, information or content navigation support through taxonomy is often constrained due to its inability to take into account the full nomenclature and cultural nuances of knowledge seekers. The emergence and increasing adoption of collaborative tagging (social bookmarking) tools have provided lightweight and informal conceptual structures called folksonomies for knowledge retrieval. As for folksonomies, they reflect the vocabulary of the users. Hence, integrating folksonomies into a taxonomy combines the best of the two schemes as the resultant structure enhances taxonomy navigation with personsalisation for knowledge search and retrieval. This paper presents TaxoFolk, an algorithm for deriving hybrid taxonomy-folksonomy classification for enhanced knowledge navigation. The algorithm integrates folksonomy with a taxonomy through several unsupervised data mining techniques with augmented heuristics.