Folksonomy

Maruja De Villa Lorica
Paper written Spring 2010

A folksonomy refers to a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaborative tagging to annotate and categorize content. Coined from the terms folk and taxonomy by Internet developer Thomas Vander Wal, folksonomy is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.

Around 2004, folksonomies became popular on the Web as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.

A significant feature of a folksonomy is that is composed of terms without hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-‍child or sibling relationships between these terms. Unlike formal taxonomies and classification schemes where there are multiple kinds of explicit relationships between terms, folksonomies are user-generated tags which cluster tags based on common URLs. Folksonomies are set of terms that a group of users tagged content with and they are not a predetermined set of classification terms or labels.

Folksonomy illustrates collective intelligence at work. Some of the identified advantages identified with folksonomies in organizing the web include: inclusiveness, currency, discovery potential, self-moderation, insights into user-behavior, spirit of sharing and community cohesion, usability, and low cost. Some of the disadvantages are: no synonym control, lack of precision, lack of hierarchy, lack of recall and susceptibility to gaming or spamming.

Sources:

Folksonomyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

ODLIS —Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science by Joan M. Reitzhttp://lu.com/odlis/odlis_t.cfm

Courtney, N. (2007). Library 2.0 and beyond: innovative technologies and tomorrow’s users. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited.