Shaping personal information spaces from collaborative tagging systems

The appearance of powerful tools for lightweight metadata creation, such as collaborative tagging systems, is harnessing the power of online communities, although such metadata are limited to human consumption only. In this paper we first propose an abstract model for representing a generic collaborative tagging system which uses RDF as the underlying technology to store metadata created by different online communities. Then, we present a scenario with the purpose of illustrating how a service able to retrieve tags from different folksonomies can support users in the organization of their personal information spaces within the context of a digital library