GroupMe! A New Kind Of Social Tagging System

The Semantic Web Group at the Distributed Systems Institute of the University of Hannover has developed a prototype for a new kind of social tagging system named GroupMe!. The idea is to extend flat social tagging systems like del.icio.us or flickr by a group extension which facilitates the extraction of semantics:

a folksonomy is just a collection of tag assignments:
(User, Tag, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag at a particular time.

Over time it is likely that semantics emerge, e.g. tags that are often assigned to same resources may be synonyms. Hence, folksonomies are promising to improve (web) search, etc. With GroupMe!‘s approach of taggable groups we extend tag assignments with a group dimension:
(User, Tag, Group, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag in a certain Group at a particular time.

This extra layer shall provide an improved foundation for search and ranking strategies, for learning relations between tags or for bridging from folksonomies to ontologies.

As is the site is not terribly impressive, you can create a group for a topic and add various resources (links, photos, videos) via drag and drop, move them around, tag them and search or browse the system, get some recommendations of similar tags or export the resources of a group as RDF document for further processing and they probably are going to run into serious usability issues as more groups and tags are added since they currently display all of them but as mentioned above the site is an early prototype. If you want to take a sneek peak they also have created a 5 minute screencast of the service.

Members of the GroupMe! team are Fabian Abel, Mischa Frank, Nicola Henze, Daniel Krause, Daniel Plappert and Patrick Siehndel.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)