Folksonomies,
Ontologies
and
Corporate
Blogging
Alexandre Passant – EDF R&D / LaLICC
Jean-David Sta – EDF R&D
Philippe Laublet – LaLICC
1 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

1
Corporate Blogging and Folksonomies
2 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Information Process in Companies
• Formal information, reports …
• Archives, search engines, diffusion process
• E-mails, coffee-break …
• Scattered information
• Restricted, closed diffusion and answering process
• Information loss
• Idea
• Use weblogs to store and exchange this unstructured – but often rich ! -
information
· Used in an internal project at EDF R&D to share information between
researchers
3 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Corporate Blogging and Folksonomies
• Post annotation
• Automated documentary meta-data (DublinCore terms)
• Folksonomies and / or ontologies ?
• Folksonomies
• Experimenting a widely-used web practice
• First-time use for our users
• Quick adoption, both in searching and publishing
4 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Visualizing the Folksonomy
• Tagcloud • Flash interface to browse tags
networks
• Latest posts for each tags
• Navigate through different tags
networks
5 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Statistics
• First year results
• 200 users, 50 regular bloggers
• 4500 posts
• 3700 tags
• 22000 tags / items relationships (~5 tags / post)
• Tags analysis
6 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

2
Identifying and Solving Folksonomy Flaws
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Folksonomy Flaws
• Tags redundancy and ambiguity
• Variation:
· EDF, Électricité De France
• Ambiguity:
· CNE: law or organisation ?
• Flat organisation of the folksonomy
• Related or suggested tags
· “Austria”: what about “Vienna” ?
8 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Linguistic Analysis of Tags Variations (1/2)
• Elision
• Reducing a compound word into one word:
· “Electrical Network”, “Network”
• Synonymy
• One word
· “Nuclear”, “Atomic”
• One component
· “Wind pump”, “Wind turbine”
• Abbreviation
• Acronyms
· “Électricité de France”, “EDF”
9 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Linguistic Analysis of Tags Variations (2/2)
• Morphological variation
• One word
· “Electric”, “Electrical”
• One component
· “Heating system” “Heat system”
• Typographic variation
• Characters
· “Wind pump”, “Windpump”, “Wind-pump”
• Errors
• Typographic or orthographic
· “Weblog”, “Welbog”, “Webblog”
10 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Completing and Suggesting Tags from Post Content
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3
Going Further with the Semantic Web
12 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

A Few Words About the Semantic Web
• Semantic Web
• Extending the current Web
• Unified description of resources
• Ontologies
• Representation of a domain
• Common vocabulary
• Languages
• Modeling: RDF(S), OWL …
• Querying: SPARQL …
13 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Folksonomies and Ontologies
• Mixing both approaches
• Keep the open spirit of folksonomies
• Use ontology layer as a formal way to represent data
• Remove ambiguity and add meaning to tags
• How ?
• Link tags to domain ontology concepts
• Create links between posts and ontology concepts using SIOC
14 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

From Tags to Ontology (1/5)
1) Create and tag post
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From Tags to Ontology (2/5)
1) Create and tag post
2) Link tag to ontology
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From Tags to Ontology (3/5)
1) Create and tag post
2) Link tag to ontology
3) Link post to ontology
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From Tags to Ontology (4/5)
1) Create and tag post
2) Link tag to ontology
3) Link post to ontology
4) Create new post
18 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

From Tags to Ontology (5/5)
1) Create and tag post
2) Link tag to ontology
3) Link post to ontology
4) Create new post
5) Infer related post
19 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

A Semantic Search Engine
• Tags and concepts
• Find concept(s) and display
associated tags
• Blog posts
• Display blog posts for searched
concept
• Related posts
• Based on ontology relationships
· Search for a country, list
all cities
• Ability to create rules
· All companies located in
a city
20 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

New Ways to View Blog Posts
• Real resources
• Properties, relations …
· Geolocation of posts tagged with a city name
21 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

4
Conclusion and Discussion
22 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded

Conclusion
• Mixing folksonomies and ontologies
• Keep simplicity of free tagging
• Tags as real resources
• Provide a better search interface for blog posts
• Infer related posts / topics
• A real use-case
• Adapt model and interfaces to users needs
• Future works
• Information extraction from blog posts using ontologies
• New ways to view and query blog posts
23 2006.10.02 Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging - BlogTalk Reloaded