Managing Social Wisdom: Efficient and Effective Search in Social Tagging Networks

Queries for tag or keyword combinations that compute and rank the top-k results thus face a large variety of options that complicate the query processing and pose efficiency challenges. We present an incremental top-k algorithm that addresses these issues with two-dimensional expansions: social expansion considers the strength of relations among users, and semantic expansion considers the relatedness of different tags. Based on principles of threshold algorithms, it folds friends and related tags into the search space in an incremental on-demand manner. The excellent performance of the method is demonstrated by an experimental evaluation on real-world datasets.