P-TAG: large scale automatic generation of personalized annotation tags for the web

The success of the Semantic Web depends on the availability of Web pages annotated with metadata. Free form metadata or tags, as used in social bookmarking and folksonomies, have become more and more popular and successful. Such tags are relevant keywords associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g., a Web page), describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification. In this paper we propose P-TAG, a method which automatically generates personalized tags for Web pages. Upon browsing a Web page, P-TAG produces keywords relevant both to its textual content, but also to the data residing on the surfer's Desktop, thus expressing a personalized viewpoint. Empirical evaluations with several algorithms pursuing this approach showed very promising results. We are therefore very confident that such a user oriented automatic tagging approach can provide large scale personalized metadata annotations as an important step towards realizing the Semantic Web.