Affiliations: Altamira Technologies Corporation, McLean, VA, USA. E-mail: John.tyler@altamiracorp.com | College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA. E-mail: jon.a.pastor@drexel.edu | Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA. E-mails: huhns@sc.edu, shad.kirmani@gmail.com, du5@email.sc.edu
Note: [] Corresponding author: Michael N. Huhns, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. Tel.: +1 803 777 5921; Fax: +1 803 777 3767; E-mail: huhns@sc.edu
Abstract: This paper describes our solution to the problem of inducing ontological information from metadata provided informally. The metadata is in the form of linguistic tags attached to items in an on-line domain. We formulate four hypotheses about the structure implicit in a set of tags and evaluate them using data from public tag sets. The results confirm three of the four hypotheses and show that it is feasible for ontological information – specifically subclass relationships – to be made explicit and hence available for inferencing.
Keywords: Folksonomy, tagging, inducing an ontology
