Folksonomized ontology and the 3E steps technique to support ontology evolvement

Folksonomies are increasingly adopted in web systems. These “social taxonomies”, which emerge from collaborative tagging, contrast with the formalism and the systematic creation process applied to ontologies. However, they can play complementary roles, as the knowledge systematically formalized in ontologies by a restricted group can be enriched by the implicit knowledge collaboratively produced by a much wider group. Existing initiatives that involve folksonomies and ontologies are often unidirectional, i.e., ontologies improve tag operations or tags are used to automatically create ontologies. We propose a new fusion approach in which the semantics travels in both directions–from folksonomies to ontologies and vice versa. The result of this fusion is our Folksonomized Ontology (FO). In this paper, we present our 3E steps technique–Extraction, Enrichment, and Evolution–which explores the latent semantics of a given folksonomy–expressed in a FO–to support ontology review and enhancement. It was implemented and tested in a visual review/enhancement tool.