Tag-based User Profile

Introduction

People construct personal profiles for self presentation and for obtaining online services. Profiles consisting of simple factual data provide an inadequate description of the individual, as they are often incomplete, mostly subjective and cannot reflect dynamic changes. We explore the idea of "you-are-what-you-tag", namely, an individual can be effectively profiled by the tags associated with his/her social media.

Figure 1. Idea of semantic tag-based profile.

We propose semantic tag-based profiles, profiles that can be represented as a set of semantically related and weighted tags. The strength of the semantic relationships between these tags are calculated using the collected commonsense knowledge base.

Visualization

The profile is visualized as tag clouds via a 3D switch effect. The proposed approach supports an intuitive and novel interface for people to browse/search through a social web site. The nodes are the top k tags for the user and their sizes are the number of bookmarks they have. The links represent the relation between tags. The weight of the links are similarity score of tags that are calculated by Chinese and English AnalogySpace. See figure 2.

Figure 2. (Right) User's tags on del.icio.us.

(Left) Visualization of the user's tag profile.