P. Massa
2005
Learning Contextualized Weblog TopicsPDF
WWW2005, 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics, 2005
The blogosphere refers to the distributed network of user opinions published on the WWW. Whereas centralized review sites such Amazon.com previously allowed users to post opinions on goods such as books and CDs, blogging software allows users to publish opinions on any topic ...MORE ⇓
The blogosphere refers to the distributed network of user opinions published on the WWW. Whereas centralized review sites such Amazon.com previously allowed users to post opinions on goods such as books and CDs, blogging software allows users to publish opinions on any topic without constraints on predefined schema. However, centralized review sites such as Amazon.com have one significant advantage: reviews pertaining to a single topic are collected together in one place, allowing readers to peruse a diverse range of opinions quickly. In this paper we examine how such a topic-centric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We characterise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current initiatives to solve the problem. Finally, we introduce the Tagsocratic project, a novel initiative to solve the concept alignment problem using techniques derived from research in language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents.