The role of natural language in social information engineering

In this paper we present work-in-progress - a technology platform for Social Collaboration in the context of Personalized Information Extraction. In particular, we consider elements of user-centered software engineering as it converges on the development of folksonomies. Results from our work-in-progress demonstrate to what extent non-IT users can apply natural language when managing their IT-based processes addressing information integration. We concentrate on the language model that supports the development of process-related folksonomies in the context of retrieving and merging textual information from different sources concerning legal documents. Findings in our work-in-progress underpin the conjecture that the computational nature of natural language overcomes the inherent problem of ambiguity when applied in a collaboration context that the users are aware of.