Collaborative Filtering

Del.icio.us provides us with an immediate picture of how people categorise valuable links online and how they label those categories. Are the labels key-terms ?

If we could look at the tag set X and then match that to the tag set Y then we could have some new exciting way of categorising the web. This applies when the tag set X is from a group of users and the tag set Y is from a target set an individual or group identifies with.

Hypothesis

This could take the form of a business knowing what tags (key-terms) they know or suspect to be of value to a product or page, and then applying those tags to the greater tag set of del.icio.us users to identify a commonality.

The next step would be to harvest the intersection of the tags via an rss feed and inserting the result set into a database.

The database then provides a reference for a set of key-terms that are human edited. The DMOZ project is trying to achieve this but with the huge growing uer base of del.icio.us users.

More on this subject at :

Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us