User-Categorized Tags to Build a Structured Folksonomy

With the coming of Web 2.0, folksonomy has emerged to help users share web-based information created by users. The basic components of folksonomy are user-inputted tags, but a major problem is that the semantics of tags are not obvious because there is no hierarchy and no relationships among the tags. To minimize these problems, this paper suggests a user-categorized tag that freely defines the category of the tag when the user inputs it. Based on the user-categorized tags, a structured folksonomy is automatically created. This paper develops a prototype as web-based document management system to describe how a structured folksonomy can be useful.