Using a Network Analysis Approach for Organizing Social Bookmarking Tags and Enabling Web Content Discovery

This article describes an innovative approach to reorganizing the tag space generated by social bookmarking services. The objective of this work is to enable effective search and discovery of Web content using social bookmarking tags. Tags are metadata generated by users for Web content annotation. Their potential as effective Web search and discovery tool is hindered by challenges such as, the tag space being untidy due to ambiguity, and hidden or implicit semantics. Using a novel analytics approach, we conducted network analyses on tags and discovered that tags are generated for different purposes and that there are inherent relationships among tags. Our approach can be used to extract the purposes of tags and relationships among the tags and this information can be used as facets to add structure and hierarchy to reorganize the flat tag space. The semantics of relationships and hierarchy in our proposed faceted model of tags enable searches on annotated Web content in an effective manner. We describe the implementation of a prototype system called FASTS to demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.