Collaborative information services on Web 2.0 are used by Internet users to produce digital information resources, and to furnish the contents of the resources with their own keywords, so-called tags. This book deals with collaborative information services and folksonomies as a method of representing knowledge and a tool for information retrieval. Collaborative information services on Web 2.0 are used by Internet users not only to produce digital information resources, but also to furnish the contents of the resources with their own keywords, so-called tags. Whilst doing so the user is not required to comply with rules, as is necessary with a library catalogue. The amount of user-generated tags in a collaborative information service is referred to as folksonomy. Folksonomies allow users to relocate their own resources and to search for other resources. This book deals with collaborative information services and folksonomies both as a method of representing knowledge and a tool for information retrieval.

In Web 2.0 users not only make heavy use of Col-laborative Information Services in order to create, publish and share digital information resources - what is more, they index and represent these re-sources via own keywords, so-called tags. The sum of this user-generated metadata of a Collaborative Information Service is also called Folksonomy. In contrast to professionally created and highly struc-tured metadata, e.g. subject headings, thesauri, clas-sification systems or ontologies, which are applied in libraries, corporate information architectures or commercial databases and which were developed according to defined standards, tags can be freely chosen by users and attached to any information resource. As one type of metadata Folksonomies provide access to information resources and serve users as retrieval tool in order to retrieve own re-sources as well as to find data of other users. The book delivers insights into typical applications of Folksonomies, especially within Collaborative Information Services, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Folksonomies as tools of knowl-edge representation and information retrieval. More-over, it aims at providing conceptual considerations for solving problems of Folksonomies and presents how established methods of knowledge representa-tion and models of information retrieval can successfully be transferred to them.

Dealing with information is one of the vital skills in the 21st century. It takes a fair degree of information savvy to create, represent and supply information as well as to search for and retrieve relevant knowledge. How does information (documents, pieces of knowledge) have to be organized in order to be retrievable? What role does metadata play? What are search engines on the Web, or in corporate intranets, and how do they work? How must one deal with natural language processing and tools of knowledge organization, such as thesauri, classification systems, and ontologies? How useful is social tagging? How valuable are intellectually created abstracts and automatically prepared extracts? Which empirical methods allow for user research and which for the evaluation of information systems? This Handbook is a basic work of information science, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state of information retrieval and knowledge representation. It addresses readers from all professions and scientific disciplines, but particularly scholars, practitioners and students of Information Science, Library Science, Computer Science, Information Management, and Knowledge Management. This Handbook is a suitable reference work for Public and Academic Libraries.

The rise of digitisation and social media over the past decade has fostered the rise of participatory and DIY digital culture. Likewise, the archival community leveraged these new technologies, aiming to engage users and expand access to collections. This book examines the creation and development of participatory archives, its impact on archival theory, and present case studies of its real world application. Participatory Archives is divided into four sections with each focused on a particular aspect of participatory archives: social tagging and commenting; transcription; crowdfunding; and outreach & activist communities. Each section includes chapters summarizing the existing literature, a discussion of theoretical challenges and benefits, and a series of case studies. The case studies are written by a range of international practitioners and provide a wide range of examples in practice, whilst the remaining chapters are supplied by leading scholars from Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This book will be useful for students on archival studies programs, scholarly researchers in archival studies who could use the book to frame their own research projects, and practitioners who might be most interested in the case studies to see how participatory archives function in practice. The book may also be of interest to other library and information science students, and similar audiences within the broader cultural heritage institution fields of museums, libraries, and galleries.

The main purpose of this book is to sum up the vital and highly topical research issue of knowledge representation on the Web and to discuss novel solutions by combining benefits of folksonomies and Web 2.0 approaches with ontologies and semantic technologies. The book contains an overview of knowledge representation approaches in past, present and future, introduction to ontologies, Web indexing and in first case the novel approaches of developing ontologies.

The World Wide Web can be considered a huge library that in consequence needs a capable librarian responsible for the classification and retrieval of documents as well as the mediation between library resources and users. Based on this idea, the concept of the “Librarian of the Web” is introduced which comprises novel, librarian-inspired methods and technical solutions to decentrally search for text documents in the web using peer-to-peer technology. The concept’s implementation in the form of an interactive peer-to-peer client, called “WebEngine”, is elaborated on in detail. This software extends and interconnects common web servers creating a fully integrated, decentralised and self-organising web search system on top of the existing web structure. Thus, the web is turned into its own powerful search engine without the need for any central authority. This book is intended for researchers and practitioners having a solid background in the fields of Information Retrieval and Web Mining.

The advent of new information retrieval (IR) technologies and approaches to storage and retrieval provide communities with previously unheard of opportunities for mass documentation, digitization, and the recording of information in all its forms. This book introduces and contextualizes these developments and looks at supporting research in IR, the debates, theories and issues. Contributed by an international team of experts, each authored chapter provides a snapshot of changes in the field, as well as the importance of developing innovation, creativity and thinking in IR practice and research. Key discussion areas include: browsing in new information environments classification revisited: a web of knowledge approaches to fiction retrieval research music information retrieval research folksonomies, social tagging and information retrieval digital information interaction as semantic navigation assessing web search machines: a webometric approach. Readership: LIS professionals , researchers and students, and for all those interested in the future of IR.