Constructing folksonomies from user-specified relations on flickr

ABSTRACT

Automatic folksonomy construction from tags has attracted much attention recently. However, inferring hierarchical relations between concepts from tags has a drawback in that it is difficult to distinguish between more popular and more general concepts. Instead of tags we propose to use user-specified relations for learning folksonomy. We explore two statistical frameworks for aggregating many shallow individual hierarchies, expressed through the collection/set relations on the social photosharing site Flickr, into a common deeper folksonomy that reflects how a community organizes knowledge. Our approach addresses a number of challenges that arise while aggregating information from diverse users, namely noisy vocabulary, and variations in the granularity level of the concepts expressed. Our second contribution is a method for automatically evaluating learned folksonomy by comparing it to a reference taxonomy, e.g., the Web directory created by the Open Directory Project. Our empirical results suggest that user-specified relations are a good source of evidence for learning folksonomies.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.8 Database applications
          Subjects: Data mining

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.6 Learning
          Subjects: Knowledge acquisition

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement

Keywords:
collective knowledge, data mining, folksonomies, social information processing, taxonomies