Semantics discovery in social tagging systems: A review

Web 2.0 has brought many collaborative and novel applications which transformed the web as a medium and resulted in its exponential growth. Tagging systems are one of these killer applications. Tags are in free-form but represent the link between objective information and users’ cognitive information. However, tags have ambiguity problem reducing precision. Hence search and retrieval pose a challenge on folksonomy systems which have flat, unstructured, non-hierarchical organization with unsupervised vocabulary. We present a brief survey of different approaches for adding semantics in folksonomies thus bringing structure and precision in search and navigation. We did comparative analysis to estimate the significance of each source of semantics. Then, we have categorized the approaches in a systematic way and summarized the feature set support. Based on the survey we end up with recommendations. Our survey and conclusion will prove to be relevant and beneficial for engineers and designers aiming to design and maintain well structured folksonomy with precise search and navigation results.