Supporting collaborative hierarchical classification: Bookmarks as an example

Bookmarks (or favorites, hotlists) are popular strategies to relocate interesting websites on the WWW by creating a personalized URL repository. Most current browsers offer a facility to locally store and manage bookmarks in a hierarchy of folders; though, with growing size, users reportedly have trouble to create and maintain a stable organization structure. This paper presents a novel collaborative approach to ease bookmark management, especially the “classification” of new bookmarks into a folder. We propose a methodology to realize the collaborative classification idea of considering how similar users have classified a bookmark. A combination of nearest-neighbor-classifiers is used to derive a recommendation from similar users on where to store a new bookmark. A prototype system called CariBo has been implemented as a plugin for the central bookmark server software SiteBar. All findings have been evaluated on a reasonably large scale, real user dataset with promising results, and possible implications for shared and social bookmarking systems are discussed.