In this work we present an in-depth analysis of the user behaviors on different Social Sharing systems. We consider three popular platforms, Flickr, Delicious and StumbleUpon, and, by combining techniques from social network analysis with techniques from semantic analysis, we characterize the tagging behavior as well as the tendency to create friendship relationships of the users of these platforms. The aim of our investigation is to see if (and how) the features and goals of a given Social Sharing system reflect on the behavior of its users and, moreover, if there exists a correlation between the social and tagging behavior of the users. We report our findings in terms of the characteristics of user profiles according to three different dimensions: (i) intensity of user activities, (ii) tag-based characteristics of user profiles, and (iii) semantic characteristics of user profiles.
While the approach of @cite_4 focuses on the construction of global user profiles, other authors observe that the process of aggregating tagging data can be beneficial not only to produce more detailed user profiles but also to better describe resources available in a Social Web system. A relevant example is provided in @cite_28 ; in that paper the authors consider users of blogs concerning music and users of Last.fm , a popular folksonomy whose resources are musical tracks. The ultimate goal of @cite_28 is to enrich each Social Web system by re-using tags already exploited in other environments. This activity has a twofold effect: it first allows the automatic annotation of resources which were not originally labeled and, then, enriches user profiles in such a way that user similarities can be computed in a more precise way.
@cite_28 @cite_4
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The Social Web is successfully established and poised for continued growth. Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, bookmarking, music, photo and video sharing systems are among the most popular; and all of them incorporate a social aspect, i.e., users can easily share information with other users. But due to the diversity of these applications -- serving different aims -- the Social Web is ironically divided. Blog users who write about music for example, could possibly benefit from other users registered in other social systems operating within the same domain, such as a social radio station. Although these sites are two different and disconnected systems, offering distinct services to the users, the fact that domains are compatible could benefit users from both systems with interesting and multi-faceted information. In this paper we propose to automatically establish social links between distinct social systems through cross-tagging, i.e., enriching a social system with the tags of other similar social system(s). Since tags are known for increasing the prediction quality of recommender systems (RS), we propose to quantitatively evaluate the extent to which users can benefit from cross-tagging by measuring the impact of different cross-tagging approaches on tag-aware RS for personalized resource recommendations. We conduct experiments in real world data sets and empirically show the effectiveness of our approaches. As the popularity of the web increases, particularly the use of social networking sites and style sharing platforms, users are becoming increasingly connected, sharing more and more information, resources, and opinions. This vast array of information presents unique opportunities to harvest knowledge about user activities and interests through the exploitation of large-scale, complex systems. Communal tagging sites, and their respective folksonomies, are one example of such a complex system, providing huge amounts of information about users, spanning multiple domains of interest. However, the current Web infrastructure provides no mechanism for users to consolidate and exploit this information since it is spread over many desperate and unconnected resources. In this paper we compare user tag-clouds from multiple folksonomies to: (a) show how they tend to overlap, regardless of the focus of the folksonomy (b) demonstrate how this comparison helps finding and aligning the user's separate identities, and (c) show that cross-linking distributed user tag-clouds enriches users profiles. During this process, we find that significant user interests are often reflected in multiple Web2.0 profiles, even though they may operate over different domains. However, due to the free-form nature of tagging, some correlations are lost, a problem we address through the implementation and evaluation of a user tag filtering architecture.