A survey on socio-semantic information retrieval

Abstract The rise of the Social Web and advances in the Semantic Web provides unprecedented possibilities for the development of novel methods to enhance the information retrieval (IR) process by including varying degrees of semantics. We shed light on the corresponding notion of semantically-enhanced information retrieval by presenting state-of-the art techniques in related research areas. We describe techniques based on the main processes of a typical IR workflow and map them onto three main types of semantics, which vary from formal semantic knowledge representations and content-based semantics to social semantics emerging through usage and user interactions.