Folksonomy

From Freepedia

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, typically using categories or tags on pages, or semantic links with types that evolve without much central control. The use of formally typed links is however rare. Folksonomy is rarely supported directly by text navigation facilities, web browsers, or other tools requiring types.

1 Informal, emergent
2 History and origin
3 Academic studies
4 References
5 External links

Informal, emergent

In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams and hierarchical organization. An example is the way in which wikis organize information into lists, which tend to evolve in their inclusion and exclusion criteria informally over time.

Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.

There is debate over any relationship between Folksonomy and folk taxonomy - the latter is usually the product of someone studying people's interactions and proposing a weak ontology to model it. This model may or may not be accepted: it is basic to the idea of folksonomy that it never become a formal taxonomy where a given classification can be claimed to be "right" or not.

Another way to characterize a folksonomy is "emergent enterprise taxonomy". It is sometimes thought useful in facilitating workplace democracy and the distribution of management tasks among people actually doing the work.

History and origin

A portmanteau of the words folk (or folks) and taxonomy, the term folksonomy has been attributed to Thomas Vander Wal. "Taxonomy" is from the Greek taxis and nomos. Taxis means "classification", and nomos (or nomia) means "management". "Folk" is from the Old English folc, meaning people. So "folksonomy" literally means "people's classification management". The features that would later be termed "folksonomy" appeared in del.icio.us in late 2003 and were quickly replicated in other social software.

Academic studies

Folksonomy is currently understood somewhat narrowly as "tagging" or "social bookmarking". Social sciences and anthropology have long studied "folk classifications"—how average people (non-experts) classify the world around them. One reference is Harold Conklin's Folk Classification: A Topically Arranged Bibliography of Contemporary and Background References Through 1971 (1972, ISBN 0913516023)

Folksonomies work best when a large number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us many people have bookmarked Wikipedia, each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular.

One problem seen by critics is that some poeple use the singular (e.g. cheval) of a word, others the plural (e.g. cheveaux). In international communities you additionally have the problem of people using different words for the same thing (e.g. book, books, Buch, Bücher).

"Jon Udell (2004) argues that the idea of abandoning taxonomy in favor of lists of keywords is not new, and that the fundamental difference in these systems is feedback."[1]