Wiki definition of Folksonomies
Written by starflyer on 2006-01-29 23:03:02
Folksonomy
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Folksonomy, a portmanteau word combining "folk" and "taxonomy," refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being categorized on the web. Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging. Examples of web services that use tagging include those designed to allow users to publish and share photographs, personal libraries, bookmarks, social software generally, and most blog software, which permits authors to assign tags to each entry.
* 1 History and origin
* 2 Folksonomy and the Semantic Web
* 3 Folksonomy in the enterprise
* 4 Folksonomy and taxonomy
* 5 Folksonomy and folk taxonomy
* 6 Problems with folksonomies
* 7 See also
* 8 References
* 9 External links
History and origin
A combination 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" in late 2003 and in Annotea they were demonstrated in 2002 [1] and the ideas were discussed long time before [2][3]. They were quickly replicated in other social software. Thomas Vander Wal has stated that folksonomy is a subset of tagging and it is "tagging that works".
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 system, even though the use of Dublin Core meta tags could increase their pages' prominence in search engine retrieval lists. In contrast to top-down controlled vocabularies such as Dublin Core, folksonomy is a distributed classification system with low entry costs. If folksonomy capabilities were built into the Web protocols, it is possible that the Semantic Web would develop more quickly.
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.
Folksonomy and taxonomy
In contrast to top-down, authoritative systems of formal taxonomy, folksonomic categories may strike those of a formal turn of mind as hopelessly idiosyncratic, but therein lies their value: a folksonomic category arises from an individual's engagement with the tagged content, such that the created category is simultaneously personal, social, and (to some degree) systematic, in an imperfect and provisional way.
Folksonomies therefore convey information on multiple levels, including information about the people who create them, and they therefore invite human engagement. If you agree with somebody's classification scheme, no matter how bizarre it might seem to others, you are subtly but strongly encouraged to explore other objects that this user has tagged.
Folksonomy and folk taxonomy
Folksonomic categories are de novo categories that Internet users invent to express how they make sense of the online world. For this reason, folksonomies should be clearly distinguished from the folk taxonomies studied by anthropologists and linguists. Folk taxonomies are learned, shared, and transmitted classifications of a people's biological surroundings.[4]
Although folk taxonomies are culturally provided and far less amenable to individual invention, they are similar to folksonomies in the sense that both systems reflect a kind of popular consensus, developed in the absence of any systematic rule set.
Problems with folksonomies
A criticism of folksonomies is that they encourage idiosyncratic tagging, increasing the complexity of retrieving content. Phenomena that may cause problems include polysemy, words which have multiple related meanings (a window can be a hole or a sheet of glass); synonym, multiple words with the same or similar meanings (tv and television, or Netherlands/Holland/Dutch) and plural words (cat and cats).[5] Those who prefer top-down taxonomies/ontologies argue that an agreed set of tags enables more efficient indexing and searching of content.
 Wikipedia |
folksonomy != semantic web
Written by bensyverson on 2006-02-20 22:54:39
I just wanted to respond to 01 point in the Wikipedia article posted-by:starflyer. It says:
"Folksonomy may hold the key to developing a Semantic Web, in which every Web page contains machine-readable metadata that describes its content."
except this is totally wrong. [tags/keywords] are not machine-readable at all. without additional information, your "meaningful" tags look like this to your software:
tag1
tag2
tag3
tag4
tag-based sw is only able to say "oh, item23 and item976 both contain tag4!" this doesn't allow for any of the reasoning that the semantic web promises; it just lets you search by keyword, much like a library in 1985.
tag-based systems have their advantages (simplicity, speed, ease of use), but machine readability and semantic webbery are NOT among them.
just something to be aware of. |
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