Boosting social annotations using propagation

This paper is concerned with the problem of boosting social annotations using propagation, which is also called social propagation. In particular, we focus on propagating social annotations of web pages (e.g., annotations in Del.icio.us). Although social annotations are developing fast, they cover only a small proportion of Web pages on the World Wide Web. To alleviate the low coverage problem, a general propagation model based on Random Surfer is proposed. Specifically, four steps are included: basic propagation, multiple-annotation propagation, multiple-link-type propagation, and constraint-guided propagation. Experimental results show that the proposed model is very effective in increasing coverage of annotations as well as preserving property of social annotations.