Organic ontology evolution as a basis for collaborative tagging in a polyscopic socio-semantic bookmarking system

The web is becoming more participatory and information is more easily shared. However, great potential for better informing over the web has not yet been realised because of the reluctance against creation of metadata and semantics which is needed for information structuring. This thesis discusses an experimental Web 2.0 prototype named Fuzzzy. Fuzzzy is a socio-semantic bookmarking system. It introduces a practical case for the Socio-Semantic Web approach which let users create semantics in a bottom-up approach. Fuzzzy lets users create a fuzzy ontology in a collaborative and open web environment. We discuss several issues related to Information Design by analyzing the construction the use of the system. In developing this application we have engaged several Socio-Semantic Web challenges: collaborative metadata creation, ontology change, scalability, semantic search, social networks, collaborative work, interaction design, visual representation of semantic networks and more. Our study has shown that socio-semantic collaborative categorization as opposed to folksonomies increase the quality of categorization considerably. Our Fuzzzy folktology is less ambiguous and provides more semantics. On the other hand it is also shown that socio-semantic tagging is more time-consuming and few users are willing to sacrifice time for creating semantic metadata. The creation of semantic metadata requires highly committed users and a clearly defined domain. The lessons learned during this project will be used to develop several Topic Map based distributed knowledge bases. We have devised the first steps towards a general model for socio-semantic holistic knowledge information infrastructure. It consists of i) the democratic self governing online community and ii) the organic ontology and knowledge base. The socio-semantic model lets users both create the knowledge contained in the knowledge base but also the underlying ontology on which the knowledge is structured