A folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs and Web links, using open-ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts. The folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us, although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of folksonomy.^[1] Collaboration is a process defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge[1] and mutual learning between two or more people working together[2] toward a common goal typically creative in nature. ... Look up taxonomy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... For Wikipedias categorization projects, see Wikipedia:Categorization. ... Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for information in documents, searching for documents themselves, searching for metadata which describe documents, or searching within databases, whether relational stand-alone databases or hypertext networked databases such as the Internet or World Wide Web or intranets, for text, sound, images or... I just want to try This page meets Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ... A screenshot of a web page. ... A photograph (often just called a photo) is an image (or a representation of that on e. ... A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference in a hypertext document to another document or other resource. ... For a proposal for tagging in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#MediaWiki issues A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2. ... Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2. ... The correct title of this article is . ...

Because folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can discover (generally) who created a given folksonomy tag, and see the other tags that this person created. In this way, folksonomy users often discover the tag sets of another user who tends to interpret and tag content in a way that makes sense to them. The result is often an immediate and rewarding gain in the user's capacity to find related content. Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: when faced with the choice of the search tools that Web sites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favor of tools that are created by the community. Google search is the worlds most popular search engine. ...

Folksonomy creation and searching tools are not part of the underlying World Wide Web protocols. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where special provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs, or to collaboratively label existing content, such as Web sites, books, works in the scientific and scholarly literatures, and blog entries. WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (or the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. ... A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of webpages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. ... A weblog (now more commonly known as a blog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). ...

Practical evaluation

Critics and information scientists suggest that the unsystematic methodology of folksomic tagging may be unreliable and inconsistent. Such inconsistencies may arise from: 1) polysemy (words which have multiple related meanings; for example, a window can be a hole or a sheet of glass); 2) synonyms, multiple words with the same or similar meanings (tv and television, or Netherlands/Holland/Dutch); and 3) word inflections (such as with plural forms, "cat" versus "cats").^[2] In addition, folksonomies all but invite deliberately idiosyncratic tagging, called meta noise, which burdens users and decreases the systems information retrieval utility. Those who prefer top-down taxonomies/ontologies argue that an agreed set of tags enables more efficient indexing and searching of content. At least different word inflections could be avoided, if there were a lemmatization engine behind the tag entry forms. The Ancient Library of Alexandria, an early form of information storage and retrieval. ... Polysemy (from the Greek πολυσημεία = multiple meaning) is the capacity for a sign to have multiple meanings. ... Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn συν = plus and onoma όνομα = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings and are interchangeable. ... Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for cat, with blue representing the masculine gender, pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender, and green representing the plural number. ... Meta noise refers to inaccurate or irrelevant metadata. ... Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for cat, with blue representing the masculine gender, pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender, and green representing the plural number. ... Lemmatization is the process of clumping words together if they are inflected forms of the same word. ...

It has been shown in a study of del.icio.us how the vocabulary of tags is becoming less and less efficient for navigation and that the collective of users are having a harder time tagging individual links.^[3] The correct title of this article is . ...

For the purposes of workflow, metadata tags need to be defined in a formal way at the time of scripting or programming. If tags are informally defined, continually changing and not governed it will be impossible to use the metadata so constructed to automate workflow and business process. Workflow at its simplest is the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. ... The simplest definition of metadata is that it is data about data. ...

Idiosyncratic folksonomic classification, although considered beneficial by some, is also viewed by others as a distinct limitation. People with similar methods of classifying things may act to reinforce each others biases and pre-existing viewpoints. Folksonomies are routinely generated by people who may have spent a great deal of time interacting with the content they tag. This level of interaction may impair objectivity or perspective to properly describe content in relation to items they are not as familiar with or know nothing about.

For example, items tagged as "Web 2.0" represent a dizzying array of seemingly inconsistent and contradictory resources.^[4] The lack of a hierarchical or systematic structure for the tagging system makes the terms relevant to what they are describing, but they often fail to show their relevancy or relationship to other objects of the same or similar type. Web 2. ...

Origin

The term folksonomy is generally attributed to Thomas Vander Wal^[5], who created the word to describe a phenomenon that had already taken recognizable form; for example, the World Wide Web Consortium's Annotea project experimented with user-generated tags in 2002.^[6] According to Vander Wal, a folksonomy is "tagging that works". Practical examples of Folksonomy would involve internet culture phenomenon such as MySpace and Xanga. Thomas Vander Wal is an information architect known for coining the term folksonomy. His work has been with the Web and with information design and structure. ... It has been suggested that W3C Markup Validation Service be merged into this article or section. ... In metadata, Annotea is an RDF standard sponsored by the w3c to enhance document-based collaboration via shared document metadata based on tags, bookmarks, and other annotations. ... MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. ... Xanga (IPA: [zæŋgə]) is a website that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, and social networking profiles. ...

Folksonomy should be distinguished from folk taxonomy, a cultural practice that has been widely documented in anthropological work. Folk taxonomies are culturally supplied, intergenerationally transmitted, and relatively stable classification systems that people in a given culture use to make sense of the entire world around them (not just the Internet).^[7] A Folk Taxonomy is a vernacular naming system, as opposed to a scientific naming system which is simply known as a Taxonomy or as a Scientific Taxonomy. ...

The term folksonomy is a portmanteau that specifically refers to the tagging systems created within Internet communities. A combination of the words folk (or folks) and taxonomy, the term folksonomy literally means "people's classification management": "Taxonomy" is from the Greek taxis and nomos. Taxis means "classification" and nomos (or nomia) means "management," while "Folk" is from the Old English folc, meaning people. A portmanteau (IPA pronunciation: ) is a word or morpheme which fuses two or more words or parts of words to give a combined or loaded meaning. ... Tagging is a term used in a number of contexts for different purposes, mostly referring to adding a tag of some form. ... Folk can refer to a number of different things: It can be short for folk music, or, for folksong, or, for folklore; it may be a word for a specific people, tribe, or nation, especially one of the Germanic peoples; it might even be a calque on the related German... Look up taxonomy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Folksonomy and the Semantic Web

Folksonomy may hold the key to developing a Semantic Web, in which every Web page contains machine-readable metadata that describes its content. Such metadata would dramatically improve the precision (the percentage of relevant documents) in search engine retrieval lists. However, it is difficult to see how the large and varied community of Web page authors could be persuaded to add metadata to their pages in a consistent, reliable way; Web authors who wish to do so experience high entry costs because metadata systems are time-consuming to learn and use. For this reason, few Web authors make use of the simple Dublin Core metadata standard, even though the use of Dublin Core meta-tags could increase their pages' prominence in search engine retrieval lists. In contrast to more formalized, top-down classifications using controlled vocabularies, folksonomy is a distributed classification system with low entry costs. The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. ... The simplest definition of metadata is that it is data about data. ... In Wikipedia, precision has the following meanings: In engineering, science, industry and statistics, precision characterises the degree of mutual agreement among a series of individual measurements, values, or results - see accuracy and precision. ... Google search is the worlds most popular search engine. ... The simplest definition of metadata is that it is data about data. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... For a proposal for tagging in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#MediaWiki issues A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2. ... Structure of a typical search results page Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural (organic or algorithmic) search results. ... Controlled vocabularies are used in indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. ...

Folksonomy in the enterprise

Since folksonomies are user-generated and therefore inexpensive to implement, advocates of folksonomy believe that it provides a useful low-cost alternative to more traditional, institutionally supported taxonomies or controlled vocabularies. An employee-generated folksonomy could therefore be seen as an "emergent enterprise taxonomy". Some folksonomy advocates believe that it is useful in facilitating workplace democracy and the distribution of management tasks among people actually doing the work. Look up taxonomy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Controlled vocabularies are used in indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. ... Peter Senge defined a learning organization as human beings cooperating in dynamical systems (as defined in systemics) that are in a state of continuous adaptation and improvement. ... Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms (including voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, systems of appeal, and so on) to the workplace. ... Look up Management in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

However, workplace democracy is also seen as a utopian concept at odds with the governing reality of the enterprise, the majority of which exist and thrive as hierarchically-structured corporations not especially aligned to democratically informed governance and decision-making. Also, as a distribution method, the folksonomy may, indeed, facilitate workflow, but it does not guarantee that the information worker will tag and, then, tag consistently, in an unbiased way, and without intentional malice directed at the enterprise. Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms (including voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, systems of appeal, and so on) to the workplace. ... See Utopia (disambiguation) for other meanings of this word Utopia, in its most common and general meaning, refers to a hypothetical perfect society. ...

Compromise with top-down taxonomies

It is possible that the differences between taxonomies and folksonomies have been overestimated. ^[8] A possible solution to the shortcomings of folksonomies and controlled vocabulary is a collabulary, which can be conceptualized as a compromise between the two: a team of classification experts collaborates with content consumers to create rich, but more systematic content tagging systems. A collabulary arises much the way a folksonomy does, but it is developed in a spirit of collaboration with experts in the field. The result is a system that combines the benefits of folksonomies -- low entry costs, a rich vocabulary that is broadly shared and comprehensible by the user base, and the capacity to respond quickly to language change -- without the errors that inevitably arise in naive, unsupervised folksonomies. A controlled vocabulary is a carefully selected list of words and phrases, which are used to tag units of information so that they may be more easily retrieved by a search. ...

The ability to group tags, e.g. del.icio.us's "bundles", provides one way for taxonomists to work with an underlying folksonomy. This allows structure to be added without the need for direct collaboration between classification experts and content consumers.

Another possible solution is a taxonomy-directed-folksonomy, which relies on the user interfaces to suggest tags from a formal taxonomy, but allows many users to use their own tags.

References

1. ^ Vanderwal, T. (2006). "Folksonomy Research Needs Cleaning Up."
2. ^ Golder, Scott A. Huberman, Bernardo A. (2005). "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems." Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs. Visited November 24, 2005.
3. ^ Ed H. Chi, Todd Mytkowicz. "Understanding Navigability of Social Tagging Systems". Palo Alto Research Center. Retrieved on 2007-05-27.
4. ^ O'Reilly, Tim (2005) "What is Web 2.0" O'Reilly.com. O'Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved on 2006-12-11.
5. ^ Vanderwal, T. (2005). "Off the Top: Folksonomy Entries." Visited November 5, 2005. See also: Smith, Gene. “Atomiq: Folksonomy: social classification.” Aug 3, 2004. Retrieved January 1, 2007 from [1].
6. ^ M. Koivunen, Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Annotation.
7. ^ Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
8. ^ Kipp M, Campbell DG (2006). "Patterns and inconsistencies in collaborative tagging systems: an examination of tagging practices.

Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 147th day of the year (148th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Programming Perl is a classic OReilly book. ... For the Manfred Mann album, see 2006 (album). ... December 11 is the 345th day of the year (346th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

See also

• Collaborative tagging
• Controlled vocabulary
• Del.icio.us
• Freetag
• Folk taxonomy
• Information architecture
• Meta noise
• Semantic similarity
• Social bookmarking
• Tag cloud
• Thesauri
• Tags
• Tagging
• Taxonomy
• Wikipedia:Categorization, for Wikipedia's internal categorization system, which has elements of both folksonomy and taxonomy
• For a proposal for tagging in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#MediaWiki issues

Collaborative tagging is regarded as democratic folksonomy metadata generation, i. ... Controlled vocabularies are used in indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. ... The correct title of this article is . ... (v. ... A Folk Taxonomy is a vernacular naming system, as opposed to a scientific naming system which is simply known as a Taxonomy or as a Scientific Taxonomy. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Meta noise refers to inaccurate or irrelevant metadata. ... Semantic similarity, variously also called semantic closeness/proximity/nearness, is a concept whereby a set of documents or terms within term lists are assigned a metric based on the likeness of their meaning / semantic content. ... Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks. ... A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2. ... The word thesaurus is derived from 16th century New Latin, in turn from Latin thesaurus, from ancient Greek thesauros, store-house, treasury. Besides its meaning as a treasury or storehouse, it more commonly means a listing of words with similar, related, or opposite meanings (this new meaning of thesaurus dates... For a proposal for tagging in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats#MediaWiki issues A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2. ... Tagging is a term used in a number of contexts for different purposes, mostly referring to adding a tag of some form. ... Look up taxonomy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

External links

• Vanderwal's take on Wikipedia's definition of folksonomy
• Anthropology News article on folksonomy.