We are happy the TagCommons added the link of SCOT project in the web site. The TagCommons has the goal as following.

The goal of this effort is to specify an agreement that specifies a common semantics and possible means for sharing or computing over tag data from heterogeneous, independently developed sources. This is a technology stack of a conceptualization, ontologies that formally specify it, and bridges to symbol-level formats and APIs.

The SCOT project has almost same goal. We try to provide the framework for sharing and reusing social tagging data and to provide the APIs. We will find out how to interlink different tag ontologies.

There are some changes in the SCOT as following:

• Add and make up for the descriptions of properties
• Add scot:associatedBy property (11-06-2007)
• Change property name
• scot:totalPosts -> scot:totalItems
• scot:totalTag -> scot:totalTags
• scot:equivalentTag -> scot:spellingVariant(07-06-2007)
• Add the subProperty and subClassOf relation
• scot:composedOf is a subProperty of dcterms:hasPart
• scot:name is a subProperty of dc:title
• scot:Tagcloud is subclass of sioc:Container
• scot:synonym is subProperty of “http://www.holygoat.co.uk/owl/redwood/0.1/tags/equivalentTag” (07-06-2007)
• Change domain values
• scot:frequency, scot:AFrequency, and scot:RFrequency have the domain value as scot:Tagcloud
  

RDFa On Rails is the rdfa library for Ruby On Rails. It supports the SCOT for tag events.
more details..

RDFa On Rails uses now SCOT for tag events

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.

View large size

The new version for the SCOT is here.

• Add Properties

hasSCOT, composedOf, hasLink
hasUsergroup, has_member (from SIOC)
ownAFrequency, ownRFrequency,
cooccurrAFrequency, cooccurRFrequency
totalTagFrequency
totalPosts
totalTags

• change

scot:tagName -> scot:name

There is no description for classes and properties in the file. We will finish this work at the end of this week.

We are opened the SCOT Dev groups in google.

url: http://groups.google.com/group/scot-dev

Please feel free to give comments.

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.

Basically user can create tags in a site. A tagcloud has a set of tags.
So we can extract the following elements:

(User, Tag, Site, Tagcloud)

and also we can think of multiple users, sub community in a site. The elements can be added;

(User, Tag, Site, Tagcloud, User group, Forum)

We can draw the following diagram to represent the relationships among elements.

Tagger: User, User group - foaf:Agent, foaf:Person, foaf:Group

Location of Tagcloud: Site, Blog, Wiki, Forum - sioc:Site, sioc:Forum

The core concepts of SCOT include Tagcloud and Tag. Tagcloud class represents a collective semantics emerged from the tagging activities of the people who are socially connected while the Tag class provides a semantically rich way of representing the concept of a tag and the relationship among tags in a given social space. One notable difference with other approaches is the implication of resources that are linked by the unique tag namespace of SCOT. Generally a tag exists in a resource and a tagcloud as a set of tags has a link to connect among the tag and the resource. We do not describe each piece of resource information in the SCOT Ontology, but we can connect a resource of individual tag by URI mechanism.

The SCOT ontology is linked to the three dimensional relationships that are represented in SIOC, FOAF, and SKOS. We use the SIOC concepts to describe site information
and relationships among site-resources as well as site-site and use the FOAF concepts to represent either a human or machine agent because a tag can be generated manually by a human user or automatically by a machine. Also we try to represent the relationships among users. This relationship has the two aspects: user-user and user-user group. When we are tagging and are using them, we assume these relationships. Finally, we use the SKOS to allow semantically relate a tag with another tag such as skos:broader and skos:narrower.

It is quite simple model to explain what is folksonomy.

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