Tagging relations to achieve complex search goals

Social search is having a flourishing success for its effectiveness in retrieving high quality information useful to achieve complex search goals. Surprisingly, the potential of the social paradigm at the basis of collaborative tagging in satisfying complex search intents has been unexplored so far. We propose an extended model of folksonomies that allows to compose and tag complex user-defined relations among items, users, and tags. We show that this model offers several means to fulfill complex search tasks that are hard to be achieved by other existing services. Furthermore, we support the validity of our approach through a data-driven analysis on Flickr photosets and we present an online portal that provides this new user experience.