A Study of User Profile Generation from Folksonomies

Abstract

Recommendation systems which aim at providing relevant information to users are becoming more and more important and desirable due to the enormous amount of information available on the Web. Crucial to the performance of a recommendation system is the accuracy of the user profiles used to represent the interests of the users. In recent years, popular collaborative tagging systems such as del.icio.us have aggregated an abundant amount of user-contributed metadata which provides valuable information about the interests of the users. In this paper, we present our analysis on the personal data in folksonomies, and investigate how accurate user profiles can be generated from this data. We reveal that the majority of users possess multiple interests, and propose an algorithm to generate user profiles which can accurately represent these multiple interests. We also discuss how these user profiles can be used for recommending Web pages and organising personal data.