Paper Wins "Most Influential Paper Award" at the European Semantic Web Conference 2013

For their publication Information Retrieval in Folksonomies: Search and Ranking the computer science researchers Andreas Hotho, Robert Jäschke, Christoph Schmitz, and Gerd Stumme won the 7 Years Most Influential Paper Award at the 10th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) in Montpellier, France. The paper was published in 2006 at the 3rd ESWC and was one of the first publications that presented a method to improve information retrieval in social bookmarking systems like Flickr, YouTube, or BibSonomy, the latter being operated by the authors at there labs in Kassel, Würzburg, and Hannover and in cooperation with the L3S.

In social bookmarking systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. The reason for the immediate success of such systems is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating. The paper introduced a formal model of folksonomies which is in common use today and presented the FolkRank algorithm that computes an improved ranking for resources of a folksonomy that eases their retrieval. FolkRank follows the idea of the seminal PageRank algorithm with adaptations to the structure of folksonomies. The algorithm is also able to find communities within social bookmarking systems and turned out to be a valuable method for tag recommendation.