The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) is being held this year in Antwerp in September and a part of this conference is the
Discovery Challenge. This should be of interest to social bookmarking enthusiasts, as the challenge this year is being held by one of the other services that do very much the same kind of thing as Connotea, Bibsonomy. They are interested in looking at spam Detection in Social Bookmarking Systems and Tag Recommendation in Social Bookmark Systems. Connotea already has a rudimentary implementation of related tags. My own feeling is that recommendations need to go further (a nice review of recommendations is given in this MIT tech review) and we need to produce article recommendations, but nonetheless, I’ll be keeping an eye on the results of this challenge, and if anyone out there is interested in applying their methods on a complimentary data set then we can arrange to get access to the Connotea data.

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