Relating Folksonomies with Dublin Core

Abstract

Folksonomy is the result of describing the Web resources with the use of tags created by the Web users. Although it has become a rich basis for the description of resources, in general terms it is not beeing integrated in the metadata. In order to be intelligible by machines and, therefore, used in the Semantic Web context, they should be automatically allocated to specific metadata elements. Thus, this paper presents part of a research carried out to continue the project Kinds of Tags (KoT), which intends to identify elements of the metadata originating from folksonomies and to propose an application profile for DC Social Tagging. It will allow that the values reported by the tags may be conveniently gathered by metadata interoperability protocols, such as the Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The results of the pilot study that confirm some of the results of the KoT, show that a significant quantity of tags could not be allocated to the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES). New properties, such as Action, Depth, Rate, and Utility are proposed. From the analysis of every tag that is contained in the dataset, those potential new properties will have to be validated by the DC Social Tagging Community.