Using WordNet to turn a Folksonomy into a Hierarchy of Concepts

As the volume of information in the read-write Web increases rapidly, folksonomies are becoming a widely used tool to organize and categorize resources in a bottom up, flat and inclusive way. However, due to their very structure, they show some drawbacks; in particular the lack of hierarchy bears some limitations in the possibilities of searching and browsing. In this paper we investigate a new approach, based on the idea of integrating an ontology in the navigation interface of a folksonomy, and we describe an application that filters del.icio.us keywords through the WordNet hierarchy of concepts, to enrich the possibilities of navigation.