Yahoo! Researcher Spreads "Folksonomy" at European Conference on Digital Libraries

Ricardo Baeza-Yates spoke recently at the 10th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) held in Alicante, Spain in September. ECDL has become the major European conference on digital libraries and associated technical, practical and social issues. The special topic this year was "Towards the European Digital Library" which aimed to emphasize the contribution of the European Digital Library research community to the current efforts of the European Commission in this direction.

Baeza-Yates talk, entitled "Queries and Clicks," focused on generating semantic resources by analyzing query logs. From the real queries that people do and the pages that they select, a kind of "folksonomy" can be derived by clustering similar content. "Folksonomy" is essentially taxonomy that is created by the users – in this case, there were about 200 of them that attended the talk and Baeza-Yates received a flurry of positive feedback following the conference, claiming that it was "inspiring."

The conference covered other topics of interest in the world of digital libraries including collection building, management and integration; multilingual information access and multimedia information handling; system architectures, integration and interoperability; and digital library applications in e-science, e-learning , e-government and cultural heritage.