Finding Resources and Collaborators within Digital Collections

This paper presents a new type of digital repositories based on a hybrid organizational structure that leverages the potential of domain specific collaborative tagging in combination with a taxonomy-driven classification. It is exemplified in Linked Course - a repository prototype for collaborative development, sharing and reuse of learning resources equipped with adequate searching tools. The focus of the paper is on the collaborative semantic annotation and searching for similar resources and users. The implemented approach is aimed at keeping the flexibility of collaborative tagging embedded in a domain-specific structured knowledge organization system.