An approach to providing a user of a “social folksonomy” with recommendations of similar users and potentially interesting resources

“Social folksonomies” can be regarded as new-generation folksonomies obtained by empowering classical folksonomies with some features typical of social networks. Currently, they represent the natural evolution of traditional folksonomies since the presence of social network features in them could lead to an enormous increase of their performance. In order to efficiently and effectively handle this kind of folksonomies, new approaches appear compulsory because the simple extension of the ones operating on classical folksonomies appears incapable of fully capturing the new potentials of these entities. In this paper, we first illustrate a new approach that fully exploits the “social” features of these folksonomies to provide a user with recommendations of similar users and resources. Then, we present some experiments devoted to measure its performance. Finally, we compare it with various related ones already proposed in the literature.

► Investigation of the role of the friendship relationship in folksonomy.
► Introduction of the concept of social folksonomy.
► A graph-based model to represent a social folksnomy.
► A technique to find and recommend similar users in a social folksonomy.
► A technique to find and recommend potentially interesting resources in a social folksonomy.