  Many social Web sites allow users to annotate the content with descriptive
metadata, such as tags, and more recently to organize content hierarchically.
These types of structured metadata provide valuable evidence for learning how a
community organizes knowledge. For instance, we can aggregate many personal
hierarchies into a common taxonomy, also known as a folksonomy, that will aid
users in visualizing and browsing social content, and also to help them in
organizing their own content. However, learning from social metadata presents
several challenges, since it is sparse, shallow, ambiguous, noisy, and
inconsistent. We describe an approach to folksonomy learning based on
relational clustering, which exploits structured metadata contained in personal
hierarchies. Our approach clusters similar hierarchies using their structure
and tag statistics, then incrementally weaves them into a deeper, bushier tree.
We study folksonomy learning using social metadata extracted from the
photo-sharing site Flickr, and demonstrate that the proposed approach addresses
the challenges. Moreover, comparing to previous work, the approach produces
larger, more accurate folksonomies, and in addition, scales better.
