The TAGora project is supporting the ACM Hypertext 2009″ conference, opening Monday 29th in Torino, Italy. TAGora will contribute to several aspects of HT09:

• a workshop on Tagging Dynamics in Online Communities
• a deployment of the Live Social Semantics application, in collaboration with the SocioPatterns project, following up on a successful deployment at the European Semantic Web Conference 2009
• a conference navigator and bookmarking system on top of the BibSonomy application
• a talk in track 2 by Andrea Capocci, Andrea Baldassarri, Vito Domenico Pietro Servedio and Vittorio Loreto, on Statistical properties of inter-arrival times distribution in social tagging systems
• a talk in track 2 by Rabeeh Abbasi and Steffen Staab, on RichVSM: enRiched Vector Space Models for Folksonomies

TAGora was present at WWW2009 in Madrid with a paper on Evaluating Similarity Measures for Emergent Semantics of Social Tagging by Ben Markines, Ciro Cattuto, Fil Menczer, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme. A paper on Social Spam Detection was presented by Ben Markines at the AIRWeb2009 workshop. Both contributions arise from a collaboration between TAGora members and the Indiana University School of Informatics.

Proposers

Vittorio Loreto
University of Rome “La Sapienza”
vittorio.loreto@roma1.infn.it

Andrea Capocci
University of Rome “La Sapienza”
andrea.capocci@gmail.com

Description

In the last few years, social annotation through the World Wide Web has shifted from its pioneering early stage to its current technological maturity: popular collaborative tagging communities are attended for many purposes by millions of users worldwide. The TAGora FET EU research project, among a wider community of scholars, has closely accompanied this evolution, by analyzing several collaborative networks born at a high rate during this time. Through deep statistical analysis, many common regularities have been uncovered throughout such systems. As a result, features found in such communities are now considered somewhat “universal”, telling researchers about the underlying social structure and semantics.

Moreover, the research groups involved in TAGora have directly impacted on such evolution, by conceiving and implementing novel projects and algorithms to enhance the power of online collaborative tagging. Websites such as Bibsonomy.org or applications such as MyTag and Tagster embody the wide knowledge developed within TAGora, taking advantage of the theoretical investigation and translating it into practical projects.

However, most of the theoretical work has not fully deployed its applicative potential yet. The study of relevance evaluation techniques, of multiple folksonomy integration and of the sociology of social tagging are still open to scientists’ contribution and the object of ongoing research. Accordingly, the workshop will consist in invited contributions reviewing the work already accomplished within TAGora by the authors themselves and possibly a small number of invited speakers, to disseminate to the general public the main results achieved so far and discuss newborn methods and future applications in such field with the community. The contributions will mainly focus on the following topics:

Non-exaustive list of topics

Collective phenomena in collaborative tagging systems
Cross-folksonomy users’ studies
Models for users’ tagging strategies
Semantics of large shared vocabularies
Recommendation strategies and algorithms

Format

The workshop will run a half day. Presentations will be preferably short (< 15 minutes) in order to leave room for open discussion, involving both experts and general audience.

Workshop Organizing Committee