Social networking for scientists using tagging and shared bookmarks: a Web 2.0 application

Web-based social networks, online personal profiles, keyword tagging, and online bookmarking are staples of Web 2.0-style applications. In this paper we report our investigation and implementation of these capabilities as a means for creating communities of like-minded faculty and researchers, particularly at minority serving institutions. Our motivating problem is to provide outreach tools that broaden the participation of these groups in funded research activities, particularly in cyberinfrastructure and e-science. In this paper, we discuss the system design, implementation, social network seeding, and portal capabilities. Underlying our system, and folksonomy systems generally, is a graph- based data model that links external URLs, system users, and descriptive tags. We conclude with a survey of the applicability of clustering and other data mining techniques to these folksonomy graphs.