Improving Search and Navigation by Combining Ontologies and Social Tags

The Semantic Web has the ambitious goal of enabling complex autonomous applications to reason on a machine-processable version of the World Wide Web. This, however, would require a coordinated effort not easily achievable in practice. On the other hand, spontaneous communities, based on social tagging, recently achieved noticeable consensus and diffusion. The goal of the TagOnto system is to bridge between these two realities by automatically mapping (social) tags to more structured domain ontologies, thus, providing assistive, navigational features typical of the Semantic Web. These novel searching and navigational capabilities are complementary to more traditional search engine functionalities. The system, and its intuitive AJAX interface, are released and demonstrated on-line.