Towards a Tag-Based User Model: How Can User Model Benefit from Tags?

This paper investigates the possibility of exploiting the user tagging activity in order to infer knowledge about the user, and investigates the relation between tagging and user modeling.

Abstract

Social tagging is a kind of social annotation by which users label resources, typically web objects, by means of keywords with the goal of sharing, discovering and recovering them. In this paper we investigate the possibility of exploiting the user tagging activity in order to infer knowledge about the user. Up to now the relation between tagging and user modeling seems not to have been investigated in depth. Given the widespread diffusion of web tools for collaborative tagging, it is interesting to understand how user modeling can benefit from this feedback.