Methodological Approach to Determine Appropriately Annotated Resources in Narrow Folksonomies

Folksonomies are community managed vocabularies, and do not limit end users to employ a strict terminology in their annotating activities. Users are free to create and use whatever tag they like. Folksonomies have also been criticized to produce low quality meta data due to reduced quality control. In the case of narrow folksonomies where resources are evaluated by only one person there is no certainty that the resources are appropriately annotated. In this paper, we suggest a three-phase iterative approach to determine the properties, expressed in terms of tag ambiguity, of resources appropriately annotated in a narrow folksonomy to improve information retrieval. We also show brief results of the first steps of that approach in a case study involving a narrow folksonomy.