Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content;^[1][2] this practice is also known as collaborative tagging,^[3] social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy, a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal, is a portmanteau of folks and taxonomy.

Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004^[4] 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.^[5] A good example of a social website that utilizes folksonomy is 43 Things.

An empirical analysis of the complex dynamics of tagging systems, published in 2007,^[6] has shown that consensus around stable distributions and shared vocabularies does emerge, even in the absence of a central controlled vocabulary. For content to be searchable, it should be categorized and grouped. While this was believed to require commonly agreed on sets of content describing tags (much like keywords of a journal article), recent research has found that, in large folksonomies, common structures also emerge on the level of categorizations.^[7] Accordingly, it is possible to devise mathematical models that allow for translating from personal tag vocabularies (personomies) to the vocabulary shared by most users.^[8]

See also

• Collective intelligence
• Ontology

References

1. ^ Peters, Isabella (2009). "Folksonomies. Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0.". Berlin: De Gruyter Saur. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Aeib_wy18gkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=folksonomies.+Indexing+and+Retrieval+in+Web+2.0#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
2. ^ Pink, Daniel H. (December 11, 2005). "Folksonomy". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html. Retrieved 14 July 2009. 
3. ^ Lambiotte, R, and M Ausloos. 2005. Collaborative tagging as a tripartite network. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DS/0512090.
4. ^ Vander Wal, Thomas. "Folksonomy Coinage and Definition". http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html. Retrieved 2009-07-06. 
5. ^ Lamere, Paul (June 2008). "Social Tagging And Music Information Retrieval". Journal of New Music Research 37 (2): 101–114. doi:10.1080/09298210802479284. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a906001732. 
6. ^ Harry Halpin, Valentin Robu, Hana Shepherd The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging, Proc. International Conference on World Wide Web, ACM Press, 2007.
7. ^ V. Robu, H. Halpin, H. Shepherd Emergence of consensus and shared vocabularies in collaborative tagging systems, ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Vol. 3(4), art. 14, 2009.
8. ^ Robert Wetzker, Carsten Zimmermann, Christian Bauckhage, and Sahin Albayrak I tag, you tag: translating tags for advanced user models, Proc. International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, ACM Press, 2010.