Link Clouds and User-/Community-Driven Dynamic Interlinking of Resources

Abstract

During the last years we have observed a shift in the way how content is added to web-based systems. Earlier, dedicated authors were responsible for adding content, today entire communities contribute. As a consequence these systems grow quickly and uncoordinated. New ways had to be found to organize and structure content. Tagging has become one of the most popular techniques to allow users (and entire user communities) to perform this structuring autonomously. But, not only because current tagging systems have their flipsides (e.g. synonyms and polysems lead to littered tag spaces making it difficult for users to find relevant content), we argue that tagging is sometimes an abstraction layer not necessarily needed. In many scenarios users just want to interlink content fragments (re- sources) with each other. In this paper we present an approach allowing users, i.e. the community, to collaboratively define relations between arbitrary content fragments. They can interlink any source with any target. We allow for personal interlinking of resources as well as collaborative interlinking. In the latter case we visualize, for each single resource, available interlinks in what we call link clouds, a concept comparable to tag clouds. We finally leverage the knowledge about the interlinks between resources’ for building personal (or community) navigation structures and for performing content recommendations. The concepts presented are being prototypically implemented within IBM’s WebSphere Portal and can be presented in a live demo at the work- shop.