Folkspace

Abstract

Although relatively new technology, folksonomies are proven to be useful. Folksonomy is a cheap and effective method for organizing and managing the content and resources. In some systems, like Delicious and Flickr, the folksonomy became the backbone around which all the services are delivered. The number of folksonomy-based applications is increasing rapidly. Following this trend there is a vision of environment where human users and more importantly software agents can query, search and retrieve resources from disparate end-points in an easy and meaningful way. The environment with network of self-organizing communities generating, annotating and sharing the content dynamically, and it is believed that folksonomy-based systems are key technology for bringing this vision into reality. But the there is still no clear understanding of how to leverage from annotations produced by folksonomies in an efficient and productive way. Complicating this matter, the interoperability between folksonomy-based applications is still a major issue. At the same time folksonomy lack of structure which also limits its usefulness. FolkSpace is a middleware or platform which is designed to solve the problems described above. FolkSpace not only provides unified access to folksonomies from different systems, but also tries to add much needed semantic structure to folksonomy. FolkSpace follows the modern standards of interoperability in Semantic Web by heavily relying on platform independent formats such as XML. From other side FolkSpace provides easy access to folksonomies though standardized query language SPARQL.