Folksonomy

A "folksonomy" is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. The freely chosen labels – called tags – help to improve search engine's effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary. The labeling process is called tagging. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and Del.icio.us.

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, often, is an immediate and rewarding gain in the user's capacity to find related content. Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: faced with the dreadful performance of the search tools that Web sites typically provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favor of tools that are both created by the community and beneficial to the community.

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.

Benefits of folksonomies

In contrast to professionally developed taxonomies with controlled vocabularies, folksonomies are unsystematic and, from an information scientist's point of view, unsophisticated; however, for Internet users, they dramatically lower content categorization costs because there is no complicated, hierarchically organized nomenclature to learn. One simply creates and applies tags on the fly.

Again in contrast to controlled vocabularies or formal taxonomies, folksonomies are inherently open-ended and can therefore respond quickly to changes and innovations in the way users categorize Internet content. Like other commons-based peer production systems, such as open source software development and Wikis like Wikipedia, although the participating individuals possess varying levels of tagging sophistication, this production process can produce results that compare favorably to the best professionally designed systems.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of folksonomy is its relevance in the information retrieval sense of the term -- that is, the capacity of its tags to describe the "aboutness" of an Internet resource. After all, folksonomies are generated by people who have spent a great deal of time interacting with the content they tag.

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, albeit 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.

Origin of the term

The term folksonomy is generally attributed to Thomas Vander Wal^[1], 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.^[2] According to Vander Wal, a folksonomy is "tagging that works".

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).^[3]

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.

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. There are however other examples of metadata based web classification systems which are used in directories such as NetInsert. The NetInsert meta tag taxonomy is one working example of a classification system employed by web authors to categorize content on the web. In contrast to more formalized, top-down classifications using controlled vocabularies, 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.

Criticisms of folksonomies

Critics suggest folksonomies are characterized by flaws that formal classification systems are designed to eliminate including polysemy (words which have multiple related meanings; for example, a window can be a hole or a sheet of glass); and synonyms, multiple words with the same or similar meanings (tv and television, or Netherlands/Holland/Dutch) and plural words (cat and cats).^[4] In addition, folksonomies all but invite deliberately idiosyncratic tagging, called meta noise, which burdens users and decreases the system's 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 was a lemmatization engine behind the tag entry forms.

Potential compromise between folksonomies and top-down taxonomies

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 democratic 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.

References

1. ^ Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2. ^ Vanderwal, T. (2005). "Off the Top: Folksonomy Entries." Visited November 5, 2005.
3. ^ M. Koivunen, Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Annotation.
4. ^ Golder, Scott A. Huberman, Bernardo A. (2005). "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems." Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs. Visited November 24, 2005.

External links

• Gene Smith on folksonomy
• Clay Shirky on folksonomy
• Vanderwal's take on Wikipedia's definition of folksonomy
• Alex Wright on folksonomy
• Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?
• Jordan Willms on Gardened hierarchical folksonomy[Gone]
• Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata by Adam Mathes Widely praised paper on folksonomy
• Peter Van Dijck on Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
• Tagging is folksonomy but folksonomy is not tagging ! A fresh approach to folksonomy.
• Salon.com's popular introduction to Folksonomy
• Bruce Sterling article on folksonomy from Wired
• Folksonomies: Power to the People a complete overview of the world-wide discussion about folksonomies from the ISKO
• Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott, *Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review, D-Lib Magazine, 11(4), 2005.
• Flickr and "folksonomies"
• Folksonomizer: generic folksonomy service
• Freetag, a generalized open source folksonomy implementation for PHP / MySQL applications.
• Anthropology News article on folksonomy.
• Panel from ETech 2005 - With Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Clay Shirky.
• Blogoforum - folksonomy discussion blog + forum; folksonomy blog+forum on folksonomy
• SayOutLoud - folksonomy discussion forum
• Tag Patterns patterns from 10 social bookmarking websites
• The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging. by Ellyssa Kroski from InfoTangle
• http://www.steve.museum/ - integrating folksonomies into the museum Web
• NetInsert web directory Using folksonomy as a means to organize the web. Web authors tag their web pages using a netinsert category meta tag which allows them to categorize content on the web. The category meta tag (stored in the html source code) is recognized by the NetInsert directory engine and presented in a human readable format open to the public. The NetInsert taxonomy is user driven through the creation of, and voting on, candidate categories in a bottom up folksonomic paradigm.

See also

• tag clouds
• controlled vocabulary
• collaborative tagging
• collabulary
• folk taxonomy
• freetag
• meta noise
• semantic similarity
• social bookmarking
• tags
• tagging
• taxonomy