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Filipe R. Cogo, Roberto Rodrigues Pereira Junior · Advances in e-business research series · 2015
Through the concept of Cognitive Authority, information relevance and quality have been related to the expertise/skill of those who publish and share information on the Web. This chapter discusses how the concept of cognitive authority can be used in order to improve the information retrieval on folksonomy-based systems. The hypothesis is that a ranking scheme that takes into account the cognitive authority of the information sources provides results of higher relevance and quality to users. To verify this hypothesis, the Folkauthority approach is adopted; a ranking scheme called AuthorityRank is proposed; and an information retrieval system, named AuthoritySearch, is built. A real social network is used to simulate the authority relationship among users, and the AuthorityRank scheme is compared with the tf-idf scheme using the NDCG metric. The results indicate a statistically significant improvement in the quality and relevance of the information obtained through the use of the AuthorityRank scheme.