As the popularity of the web increases, particularly the use of social networking sites and style sharing platforms, users are becoming increasingly connected, sharing more and more information, resources, and opinions. This vast array of information presents unique opportunities to harvest knowledge about user activities and interests through the exploitation of large-scale, complex systems. Communal tagging sites, and their respective folksonomies, are one example of such a complex system, providing huge amounts of information about users, spanning multiple domains of interest. However, the current Web infrastructure provides no mechanism for users to consolidate and exploit this information since it is spread over many desperate and unconnected resources. In this paper we compare user tag-clouds from multiple folksonomies to: (a) show how they tend to overlap, regardless of the focus of the folksonomy (b) demonstrate how this comparison helps finding and aligning the user's separate identities, and (c) show that cross-linking distributed user tag-clouds enriches users profiles. During this process, we find that significant user interests are often reflected in multiple Web2.0 profiles, even though they may operate over different domains. However, due to the free-form nature of tagging, some correlations are lost, a problem we address through the implementation and evaluation of a user tag filtering architecture.

This research has been supported by the TAGora project, funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies program (IST-FET) of the European Commission under the contract IST-34721, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (TIN2005–6885). The information provided is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not reflect the Commission’s opinion. The Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of data appearing in this publication.

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in HT '08 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379103.