Universität zu Köln

Gontek, Mirko (2011). User modeling for exploratory search on the Social Web. Exploiting social bookmarking systems for user model extraction, evaluation and integration. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

Exploratory search is an information seeking strategy that extends be- yond the query-and-response paradigm of traditional Information Retrieval models. Users browse through information to discover novel content and to learn more about the newly discovered things. Social bookmarking systems integrate well with exploratory search, because they allow one to search, browse, and filter social bookmarks. Our contribution is an exploratory tag search engine that merges social bookmarking with exploratory search. For this purpose, we have applied collaborative filtering to recommend tags to users. User models are an im- portant prerequisite for recommender systems. We have produced a method to algorithmically extract user models from folksonomies, and an evaluation method to measure the viability of these user models for exploratory search. According to our evaluation web-scale user modeling, which integrates user models from various services across the Social Web, can improve exploratory search. Within this thesis we also provide a method for user model integra- tion. Our exploratory tag search engine implements the findings of our user model extraction, evaluation, and integration methods. It facilitates ex- ploratory search on social bookmarks from Delicious and Connotea and pub- lishes extracted user models as Linked Data.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD thesis)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Gontek, Mirko UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-46163
Date:	10 June 2011
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Fächergruppe 6: Geschichte
Subjects:	Data processing Computer science
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language exploratory search, information retrieval, social bookmarking, folksonomies, user modeling, recommender systems, linked data, ontologies English
Date of oral exam:	16 November 2011
Referee:	Name Academic Title Thaller, Manfred Prof. Dr.
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/4616