A CONVERSION PROCESS FROM FLICKR TAGS TO RDF DESCRIPTIONS
Author(s):
Mohamed Zied Maala,
Alexandre Delteil,
Ahmed Azough
Paper abstract: The recent evolution of the Web, now designated by the term Web 2.0, has seen the appearance of a huge
number of resources created and annotated by users. However the annotations consist only in simple tags
that are gathered in unstructured sets called folksonomies. The use of more complex languages to
annotate resources and to define semantics according to the vision of the Semantic Web, would improve
the understanding by machines and programs, like search engines, of what is on the Web. Indeed tags
expressivity is very low compared to the representation standards of the Semantic Web, like RDF and
OWL. But users appear to be still reluctant to annotate resources with RDF, and it should be recognized
that Semantic Web, contrary to Web 2.0, is still not a reality of today’s Web. One way to take advantage
of Semantic Web capabilities right now, without waiting for a change of the annotation usages, would be
to be able to generate RDF annotations from tags. As a first step toward this direction, this paper presents
a tentative to automatically convert a set of tags into a RDF description in the context of photos on
Flickr. Such a method exploits some specificity of tags used on Flickr, some basic natural language
processing tools and some semantic resources, in order to relate semantically tags describing a given
photo and build a pertinent RDF annotation for this photo.
Keywords:
Web 2.0, tags, RDF, annotation generation
