WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe users. In the TM there is a paradigm shift where the central pivot is the “tag”―i.e., the system centralizes,organizes and manages tags, regardless of what the objects are and regardless the system in which they werecategorized. Our proposal for the TM system is to build a high-level layer of tags for the users, turning themanagement of their tags independent of the folksonomy-based systems and their objects. In agreement withseveral authors (Mathes, 2005; Riddle, 2005; Sturtz, 2004), we think that if the users maintain a morecoherent and organized vocabulary, they tend to do a more coherent and organized categorization. Hence,TM may improve tags usefulness for the organization of personal information, reducing the problems foundwhen a controlled vocabulary is not applied. Moreover, if users are creating better personomies in theindividual point of view, then a better folksonomy will be obtained when these personomies are shared acrossthe system, collaborating to the collective/social point of view.The centralization and management of the users’ personomies is a keystone for obtaining better resultswith the application of the folksonomy technique. Indeed, we argue that it is the first step in developingresources for assisting users and emerging the social knowledge generated in these systems. Centralizing theusers’ vocabulary and the personomy makes the reuse, correction and management of tags, as well as theinformation recommendation more effectively.There is another system, called MyTag (http://mytag.uni-koblenz.de), which offers resources for searchingover folksonomy-based systems (for the moment over Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Connotea, BibSonomy andBibTex). However, this system has no features for centralizing the users’ vocabularies and for helping in theirmaintenance and organization, which is the main goal of the TM. The focus of the MyTag system is onsearching over other systems (i.e. information retrieval), while TM focuses in the centralization andmanagement of the users’ vocabulary and offers information retrieval.4. TAGMANAGER: A TAG-FOCUSED APPROACHThe problem of lack of quality in the information retrieval stage of folksonomy-based systems is partiallybecause those systems judge with equal importance categorizations done by any user. Consequently, theywill retrieve every object categorized with certain tag by every user that categorized it. There is no way offiltering or prioritizing categorizations done by people that really understand about the subjects which theyare categorizing (Pereira and da Silva, 2008). The tagging tension point of “Amateurs vs. Experts” is strongin folksonomy-based systems due to their intrinsic social nature (i.e., sharing and interaction) and results in agreat amount of irrelevant information whose quality cannot be easily verified.Wilson (1983) coined the term cognitive authority to explain the kind of authority that influences people’sthoughts and what they believe. The theory of the cognitive authority put up two important subjects: 1) whatdoes people resort to second-hand knowledge (coming from others)? And 2) do they resort to whom? Theanswer to the first question can be summarized in a word “need”; and for the second in the following way“people resort to whom they judge to know something that themselves do not know”.Therefore, given that we normally use second-hand knowledge in our lives, it is reasonable to think thatwe can also use it to improve the quality of the information retrieved on the Web. We propose to do it usingrecommendation about a subject/area from who knows about the subject. Folkauthority (folk + authority) is aneologism we proposed in (Pereira and da Silva, 2008) designating the authority granted through folksonomyto the entities that are sources of information on the Web. This concept represents our user-focused approachfor reducing the problems of information overload we explained in previous sections.To apply the folkauthority concept corresponds to allow users of a folksonomy-based system to ascribecognitive authority to the information sources with which the system works. This authority ascription isaccomplished through the attribution of tags that represent the competences, abilities or areas in whichinformation sources are considered references (i.e., an authority) by their categorizers (i.e., the authorityassigners). Russell (2005) was the first to mention the use of folksonomy for the cognitive authorityascription with the intention of identifying authorities in a community of users.The use of the folkauthority process in a folksonomy-based system is adequate for four reasons. First, afolksonomy is characterized by the freedom of users’ expression, and that is what users need, since nobodycan say who is a cognitive authority for other person: the person should conclude that. Second, an authoritypossesses peculiar characteristics (e.g., sphere of interest, values, etc.) which tags are capable of representingproperly. Third, in folksonomy-based systems categorizations of information are done by their own users,148