fact on the number of resources whose set of meta-
data matches one or more of the predefined schemes
so that programs specially written according to the
same scheme(s) will be able to use those resources.
So the Web of data that W3C indicates turns out to
be something like a huge database where a neat defi-
nition of the logical scheme (even composed of many
different ontologies) can be achieved only thanks to
the standardization of the metadata tags to be used to
describe resources. In the opposite direction goes the
practice of free tagging, so that folksonomies emerge
as everlasting works in progress where concept-terms
institution and resource description and classification
always happen in the same time, with no hope for
standardization. In fact, when people tag they freely
choose and establish their own categories in an unend-
ing process of ontology elaboration. Moreover, while
using their very personal categories people also ex-
press their own “world’s understanding” so that tag-
ging spaces are not only useful for classification, but
also convenient for collective intelligence to share
knowledge. We remark that tagging spaces publish
enormous amounts of resources with some kind of
classification while providing a cognitive framework
that has not the claims of ontology but that is pow-
erful enough to let one recognize and find classes of
resources that are compatible, i.e. similar to some ex-
tent. Maybe such a cognitive framework is a lower
quality contribution, in comparison to formal DL on-
tologies, to have the content of the Web surely rec-
ognizable, but it seems to show a more feasible way
to do that. In fact, since it relies on no pre-emptive
requirements, no standardized label to tag resources,
it preserves the dynamical behaviour of Web2.0 and
lets Semantic Web to be a “common people affair”
as it has been for last years for WorldWideWeb, and
for its big boom. However, it still lacks an appropri-
ate theoretical framework to be successfully exploited
to the benefit of Semantic Web. Therefore we pro-
pose one: to consider tagging spaces without any at-
tempt to reduce them to formal ontologies. Instead of
the usual techniques for tags clustering and concept
extraction, we may exploit OCSs in order to recover
from tagging spaces a description of the resources in a
datasource that is formal enough to be useful for data
exchange but that does not need ad hoc specification
of a conceptual hierarchy. We look only for compat-
ibility between resources observing the connections
given within an OCS. Since operations between co-
herence spaces have already been largely studied in
LL, we have almost ready-to-use precision tools to
talk about usual operations (union of ontologies, mod-
ule extraction, . . . up to ontology merging) via their in-
terpretation as operations between OCSs using the LL
connectives – and thus opening to a new role to play
in Computer Science for LL (Ehrhard et al., 2004).
Our proposal is then to give more logical dignity to
flat tagging spaces without rising too high in formal
complexity so as to prevent large contribution from
common web-users. We simply aim to describe flat
spaces in such a way that it makes sense to talk about
operations between them.
4.2 Folksonomies out of OCS
In order to have an OCS out of a flat tagging space
we need nothing more than what has been stated for
ontologies, since we will consider it as a very sim-
ple ontology, with just some niceties: the language
L (F) of such a folksonomy F will be the pair (T, I)
where T is the set of tag-terms and I the set of URIs.
The web of the OCS [F, I, φ] will be |[F, I, φ]| = I. φ
is the pointer from a tag-term t to the set φ(t) ⊆ I of
the resources tagged with t – i.e. it is a query. The
compatibility relation is slightly revised as x ¨
[F,I,φ]
y ⇐⇒ ∃t ∈ L (F) s.t.
{
x, y
}
⊆ φ(t). We observe
some characteristics of such an OCS: i) for every tag-
term t: t ∈ T → ∃x ∈ I x ∈ φ(t); ii) if we assume that
in a tagging space there cannot be a resource that
has no tag, we have also the inverse, for every URI
i: i ∈ I → ∃v ∈ T i ∈ φ(v). These mean that we have
no empty concepts and that the graph associated to a
folksonomy may be a fully labelled graph. Moreover,
we remark that thanks to the compatibility relation we
are now able to read and build concepts out of the
tagging space in an original way. In fact we do not
search for interesting concepts looking at recurring
couplings of certain tag-terms stuck to different re-
sources (looking for synonymy or some subsumption
between terms). Quite the contrary, while searching
for cliques we look at recurring couplings of certain
resources under different tags, i.e. among the URIs
retrieved for the tags. We look for compatibility be-
tween resources and try to collect all the classes of
compatibility, what turns out to be a new tool for con-
cept discovery. Based on the definition of compati-
bility, we may have a class of compatible resources
which are not all together within the retrieved URIs
for one single tag, yet they are all pairwise compati-
ble. It is such a case that of a possible new concept not
explicitly recognized on the part of the tagging com-
munity but implicitly present as an underlying idea of
compatibility. Whether such a concept can be identi-
fied with some linguistic term or not, it is not impor-
tant: we are abstracting from linguistic determination
of compatibility classes and we can grasp some new
concept which one can look for other elements com-
patible with.
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