automatic tags vs user-generated tags, pt2

Can tags be clustered automatically and brought into some form of hierarchy?
In our skillMap approach, we rely on the crowd intelligence of a/the community to network tags manually into a weak hierarchy. However, there is a discussion going on whether it is feasible to do that automatically, for example here:
www.connotea.org/search?q=tag+clustering
www.rawsugar.com/www/2006/20.pdf
www.bibsonomy.org/search/tag+clustering

(thanks to Andreas)

automatic keyword generation/tagging

A lot of the hype in the web2.0 world is around the concpt of tagging. Tags are attached to objects by human beings, but there are thoughts whether this can be done automatically. One of the first services that offer free public auto tagging is the topicalizer. It auto-generates keywords for any URL along with a load of other statistics (e. g. readibility etc). It didn't work very wellfor the German sites I entered, but it as a nice API. I would really like to do a study determining the similarity of automatically generated tags and user-generated tags (i.e. with delicious tag clouds or skillMap-tags).

First day of the Wb n+1 workshop @ Sun Microsystems Switzerland

Insights from the internal Web n+1 workshop at Sun microsystems in Zürich on 23/24 january that we were kindly invited to by Peter Reiser.

On the first day, we received positive feedback from the Sun people on our skillMap/tagNet project that I demonstrated twice during that day. Some quotes of participants' reactions:

"I think its really cool"
"they're onto a real problem"
"their model is the better model"
"It would be useful to pilot"

That was a great start and we hope to get approval for a pilot that we planned during the afternoon. High spirits in the evening, great swiss Käsefondue at Swiss Chuchi in central Zürich. A big thank you to Peter for the kind invitation and a tremendous day. I met some great people, for example Matt Stevens, Henry Story, Dave Levy and Chris Gerhard. I got a short mention in Dave's blog.