Today, Vittorio Loreto (PIL Group, Physics Department of La Sapienza University) invited me to partecipate to the kick-off meeting of an innovative research project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the FET proactive initiative Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems.

The TAGora project aims to leverage online social systems to collect and analyze large amounts of raw data to provide the foundation of a scientific research about the behavior of users and the dynamics of information in online communities.

As long as I know, this could be the first example of a interdisciplinary scientific study about the data produced by online collaborative tagging. The collected information will be made available to other groups to stimulate other research and discussions.

Semiotic Dynamics is the study of:

how semiotic relations can originate, spread, and evolve over time in populations, by combining recent advances in linguistics and cognitive science with methodological and theoretical tools of complex systems and computer science.

The project aim is:

providing a virtuous cycle between data collection, data analysis, modeling and theoretical constructions, with the ultimate goal of understanding, predicting and controlling the Semiotic Dynamics of online social systems.

The project will develop reference datasets, innovative techniques and tools for data analysis and mining, modeling schemes for the observed phenomenology, proof-of-concept tools aimed at better structuring and navigating information.

The TAGora Consortium will bring together high-quality partners with complementary expertise:

• Physics Department, Universify of Roma “La Sapienza” University, Italy
• Sony Computer Science Laboratory, France
• Department of Computer Science, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
• Knowledge & Data Engineering unit, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Kassel, Germany
• The School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK

Folksonomies are becoming one of my main interests but I’m also sure that they can dramatically influence the way in which we think and do information architecture.

I’m honoured of being invited to bring my two cents.

In the while, Collaborative Tagging and Semiotic Dynamics is a paper published by Vittorio on the topic and I’m happy to learn that Riccardo Cambiassi (Headshift) and Pietro Speroni will be there too.

A photo of the day on Flickr.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.