EU IST Future and Emerging Technologies Project "TAGORA"

Short description

A new paradigm is quickly gaining impact in large-scale information systems: Folksonomies. In applications like Flickr, Connotea, Citeulike, Delicious, etc. people no longer make a passive use of online resources - they take on an active role and enrich resources with semantically meaningful information. Such information consists of terminology (or "tags") freely associated by each users to resources and is shared with users of the online community. Despite its intrinsic anarchist nature, the dynamics of this terminology system spontaneously leads to patterns of terminology common to the whole community or to subgroups of it. Surprisingly, this emergent and evolving semiotic system provides a very efficient navigation system through a large, complex and heterogeneous sea of information. Our project proposes a visionary and high risk research aimed at giving a scientific foundation to these developments, so contributing to the growth of the new field of semiotic dynamics. Semiotic dynamics studies how semiotic relations can originate, spread, and evolve over time in populations, by combining recent advances in linguistics and cognitive science with methodological and theoretical tools of complex systems and computer science. The project aims at exploiting the unique opportunity offered by the availability of enormous amount of data. This goal will be achieved through: (a) a systematic and rigorous gathering of data that will be made publicly available to the consortium and to the scientific community; (b) designing and implementing innovative tools and procedures for data analysis and mining; (c) constructing suitable modelling schemes which will be implemented in extensive numerical simulations. We aim in this way at providing a virtuous feedback between data collection, analysis, modelling, simulations and (whenever possible) theoretical constructions, with the final goal to understand, predict and control the semiotic dynamics of on line social systems.

Publications

2008

Abbasi2008ITP
Abbasi, Rabeeh; Staab, Steffen (2008): Introducing Triple Play for Improved Resource Retrieval in Collaborative Tagging Systems. In: In: Proc. of ECIR'08 Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR 2008).

Goerlitz2008PPI
Görlitz, Olaf; Sizov, Sergej; Staab, Steffen (2008): PINTS: Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure for Tagging Systems. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems, IPTPS. Tampa Bay, USA:

Braun2008PSA
Braun, Max; Dellschaft, Klaas; Franz, Thomas; Hering, Dominik; Jungen, Peter; Metzler, Hagen; Müller, Eugen; Rostilov, Alexander; Saathoff, Carsten (2008): Personalized Search and Exploration with MyTag. In: Proceedings of the WWW 2008 Poster Session.

Dellschaft2008AED
Dellschaft, Klaas; Staab, Steffen (2008): An Epistemic Dynamic Model for Tagging Systems. In: HYPERTEXT 2008, Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia.

Goerlitz2008TTD
Görlitz, Olaf; Sizov, Sergej; Staab, Steffen (2008): Tagster - Tagging-Based Distributed Content Sharing. In: Proceedings of the ESWC 2008 Demo Session.

2007

Abbasi2007ORO
Abbasi, Rabeeh; Staab, Steffen; Cimiano, Philipp (2007): Organizing Resources on Tagging Systems using T-ORG. In: Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, workshop at ESWC 2007. Innsbruck, Austria:

2006

Dellschaft2006OHT
Dellschaft, Klaas; Staab, Steffen (2006): On How to Perform a Gold Standard Based Evaluation of Ontology Learning. In: I. Cruz et al., : Proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). Springer Verlag. S. 228-241.

 

Project Homepage

http://www.tagora-project.eu/

Software

More information on the peer-to-peer tagging software Tagster can be found here.

Related project with participation from Koblenz

EMIL - Emergence in the Loop: Simulating the two-way dynamics of norm innovation