We are happy to inform that http://int.ere.st is launching. The main objective of int.ere.st is to demonstrate how Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies can be combined to provide better metadata creating and sharing support across online communities. With int.ere.st, you can save, tag and bookmark your own as well as others’ SCOT ontologies. The tag meta search allows you to look for similar patterns of tagging of persons with their interest based on tags. Various functionalities are given as following:

various tag search: and(&), or(space), co-occurrence(+), broader(>), and narrower(<)
User search
Meta tagging
Resource search
Ontology bookmark
Integrate tagged data across communities
Share FOAF, SIOC, and SCOT ontologies

You can try it at http://int.ere.st
We will release a next version of the SCOT exporter as soon as possible.

The SCOT can be differentiated by level of participation. If a SCOT is only for one single user, we called it as “Personal SCOT(PSCOT)”. However, if multiple users have participated the social tagging activity, it could be “Group SCOT(GSCOT)” for the users. In this case, the GSCOT could be considered user-oriented folksonomy for the group. The GSCOT has own namespace to identify and is composed of individual PSCOTs. Here is the example.

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From Suk Hyung’s comment, he and I try to represent intuitively the SCOT ontology.
In his comment he use three elements for defining a folksonomy as the following:

F = (P, T, R, Y)
where, P : the set of People
T : the set of Words(i.e. “Tags”)
R : the set of Resources
Y \subset P \times T \times R : it represents “tagging”.

There are lots of efforts to define formal model of a folksonomy. For example, Andreas defines the term personomy and folksonomy as a formal concept in his paper(Bibsonomy: A Social Bookmark and Publication Sharing System).

See Definition 1, 2

See Definition 3

I think the basic elements for the folksonomy should be a combination of (user, tag, resource). But when we use folksonomy from del.icio.us, flickr etc a resource is linked by a unique namespace, and user and tag is not a single value. I think it might be hard to describe three elements together.
Ok. what is a main purpose of the SCOT model? The SCOT model aims to represent a folksonomy model. A folksonomy consists of a set of users, a set of tags, and a set of resources, and the set of tag must have frequencies of the individual tags.

To do so, the SCOT model should have a container for three elements. The Tagcloud class has two core properties (scot:tagcloudOf, scot:locatedIn) to describe user, site information and the Tag class has a number of properties to describe semantics of tags. A specific resource can be linked the unique namespace in conjuntion with the tagcloud’s namespace and tag.

Based on James’ model, we try to make abstract relation model for SCOT, SIOC, FOAF, SKOS, and folksonomy. Basically SOCT may has entire elements of folksonomy and could be connected to other RDF vocabularies.

It is quite simple model to explain what is folksonomy.

copyright to all biscuit’s photos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/allbiscuit/)

I think folksonomy might be overrated. The vision and principles of folksonomy are reasonable. The problem stems from the realization.

Tagging is a user-oriented cognitive activity, but folksonomy is only statistically weighted terms lists

There is no meanings and relationships among each terms

Sharing and Reusing data limited to host site

Folksonomy itself is NOT solution

what do we need?

Minimal Structure

Minimal Semantic

Unique local tag namespace