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Colloquia Archive

Social Annotations and Social Similarity

November 14, 2008

Host: Mathew Palakal

Abstract

The popularity of collaborative tagging systems is prompting research on mining large bodies of social annotations to improve navigation, search, and to populate semantic web applications. In this talk we describe the architecture of collaborative tagging systems and introduce the relevant information networks and their properties, using data from popular systems such as Delicious and Flickr. We show that several notions of social similarity can be introduced on top of folksonomies, and we present a systematic characterization of social similarity in terms of formal representations of knowledge. We provide a semantic grounding by mapping pairs of similar tags in the folksonomy to pairs of synsets in Wordnet, where we use validated measures of semantic distance to characterize the semantic relation between the mapped terms. This exposes important features of the investigated measures of tag similarity and indicates which of them are better suited in the context of a given application.

Further information on mining socio-semantic networks from web-based collaborative systems is available here:

http://isiosf.isi.it/~cattuto/papers/cattuto_iswc2008.pdf

Biography

Since late 2007 has been a researcher at the Institute for Scientific Interchange, Torino, Italy. His research focuses on modeling complex phenomena in online information systems and using the concepts of statistical physics to study communication and self-organization in technological and social systems. He received his PhD in theoretical Physics from the University of Perugia, Italy. After working in the software industry, he worked at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then moved to the Frontier Research System of the RIKEN Institute, Japan as a post-doctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. After three years in Tokyo he moved to Rome to join the "Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi" as well as the Physics Department of the University of Rome "La Sapienza," where he played a key role in creating the TAGora project. In late 2007 he joined the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino.