Semantic tag cloud generation via DBpedia

Many current recommender systems exploit textual annotations (tags) provided by users to retrieve and suggest online contents. The text-based recommendation provided by these systems could be enhanced (i) using unambiguous identifiers representative of tags and (ii) exploiting semantic relations among tags which are impossible to be discovered by traditional textual analysis. In this paper we concentrate on annotation and retrieval of web content, exploiting semantic tagging with DBpedia. We use semantic information stored in the DBpedia dataset and propose a new hybrid ranking system to rank keywords and to expand queries formulated by the user. Inputs of our ranking system are (i) the DBpedia dataset; (ii) external information sources such as classical search engine results and social tagging systems. We compare our approach with other RDF similarity measures, proving the validity of our algorithm with an extensive evaluation involving real users. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.