Upper Tag Ontology (UTO) For Integrating Social Tagging Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO), a framework designed to model, integrate, and analyze social tagging data across multiple platforms, enhancing data interoperability and semantic understanding.

Contribution

The paper presents UTO, a novel ontology that emphasizes the structure of tagging activities for better data integration and alignment across social bookmarking sites.

Findings

UTO effectively models tagging activities across platforms

UTO facilitates data harvesting, integration, and analysis

Demonstrated utility with data from Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube

Abstract

Data integration and mediation have become central concerns of information technology over the past few decades. With the advent of the Web and the rapid increases in the amount of data and the number of Web documents and users, researchers have focused on enhancing the interoperability of data through the development of metadata schemes. Other researchers have looked to the wealth of metadata generated by bookmarking sites on the Social Web. While several existing ontologies capitalize on the semantics of metadata created by tagging activities, the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO) emphasizes the structure of tagging activities to facilitate modeling of tagging data and the integration of data from different bookmarking sites as well as the alignment of tagging ontologies. UTO is described and its utility in harvesting, modeling, integrating, searching and analyzing data is demonstrated with metadata harvested from three major social tagging systems (Delicious, Flickr and YouTube).