Collaborative Categorization on the Web: Approach, Prototype, and Experience Report

Collaborative categorization is an emerging direction for research and innovative applications. Arguably, collaborative categorization on the Web is an especially promising emerging form of collaborative Web systems because of both, the widespread use of the conventional Web and the emergence of the Semantic Web providing with more semantic information on Web data. This paper discusses this issue and proposes two approaches: collaborative categorization via category merging and collaborative categorization proper. The main advantage of the first approach is that it can be rather easily realized and implemented using existing systems such as Web browsers and mail clients. A prototype system for collaborative Web usage that uses category merging for collaborative categorization is described and the results of field experiments using it are reported. The second approach, called collaborative categorization proper, however, is more general and scales better. The data structure and user interface aspects of an approach to collaborative categorization proper are discussed.