eLab’s Knowledge Repository

eLab – Semantic Web.ppt 

The main objectives of the Semantic Web are to give meaning to Web content by using metadata to describe documents and thus to offer better search capabilities to users. It is based on standards (XML, RDF, OWL).

Metadata can be based on a centrally controlled vocabulary (taxonomy or thesaurus), such as in Yahoo! directory, or on open collaborative tagging. A tag is a keyword or a label for a Webpage, a document, an image,…

The collaborative tagging system is often referred to as a folksonomy (a contraction of folk and taxonomy) and is for example used in flickr to describe pictures and in del.icio.us to share bookmarks. By using freely chosen labels – tags – Internet users can categorize content and improve search engine's effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary. The main criticisms against folksonomy are the users' lack of discipline and ambiguity (synonyms, context, polysemy), whereas some argue that controlled vocabularies are too complicated and in some case not relevant for end users.

Collabulary, "collaborative vocabulary", combines the approaches of controlled and open-ended vocabularies. End users or content consumers can create their tags, which are then validated by other users and experts in the field.

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