Hierarchical categorisation of web tags for Delicious

Abstract

In the scenario of social bookmarking, a user browsing the Web bookmarks web pages and assigns free-text labels (i.e., tags) to them according to their personal preferences. The benefits of social tagging are clear – tags enhance Web content browsing and search. However, since these tags may be publicly available to any Internet user, a privacy attacker may collect this information and extract an accurate snapshot of users’ interests or user profiles, containing sensitive information, such as health-related information, political preferences, salary or religion. In order to hinder attackers in their efforts to profile users, this report focuses on the practical aspects of capturing user interests from their tagging activity. More accurately, we study how to categorise a collection of tags posted by users in one of the most popular bookmarking services, Delicious (http://delicious.com).