Seeding, Weeding, Fertilizing – Different Tag Gardening Activities for Folksonomy Maintenance and Enrichment Katrin Weller (Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany weller@uni-duesseldorf.de) Isabella Peters (Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany isabella.peters@uni-duesseldorf.de) Abstract: As social tagging applications continuously gain in popularity, it becomes more and more accepted that models and tools for (re-)organizing tags are needed. Some first approaches are already practically implemented. Recently, activities to edit and organize tags have been described as “tag gardening”. We discuss different ways to subsequently revise and reedit tags and thus introduce different “gardening activities”; among them models that allow gradually adding semantic structures to folksonomies and/or that combine them with more complex forms of knowledge organization systems. Keywords: Social tagging, folksonomy, tag gardening, emergent semantics, knowledge organization system, knowledge representation Categories: H.3.1, H.3.3, H.3.5, L.1.3, L.1.0 1 Introduction Social tagging functionalities are by now a common feature for most social software applications (e.g. video or photo sharing platforms, social networking and social bookmarking tools). Folksonomies are used to organize various types of resources such as scientific articles, references, bookmarks, pictures, videos, audio files, blog posts, discussions, events, places, people etc. They have been greatly accepted by (Web) users as well as by a considerably large scientific community – although several shortcomings of folksonomies have been pointed out [Peters 06], [Peters & Stock 07]. These critiques are mainly based on comparisons of folksonomies with traditional methods of knowledge organization systems (KOS, like thesauri, classification systems etc.) and professional indexing techniques. Yet, the boundaries between structured KOS and folksonomies are not at all solid but rather blurred. This means, amongst others, that folksonomies can adopt some of the principle guidelines available for traditional KOS and may gradually be enriched with some elements of vocabulary control and semantics. On the other hand, folksonomies provide a useful basis for the stepwise creation of semantically richer KOS and for the refinement of existing classifications, thesauri or ontologies [Weller 07]. One of the basic questions regarding the enhanced use of folksonomies is: how to combine the dynamics of freely chosen tags with the steadiness and complexity of controlled vocabularies? It appears that a gradual refinement of folksonomy tags and Proceedings of I-SEMANTICS ’08 Graz, Austria, September 3-5, 2008