Folksonomies

Deprecated: use Folksonomy

A classification concept that has gained a lot of attention lately is folksonomies (social classification or people's classification management).

The folksonomy is a means for people to tag objects (web pages, photos, videos, podcasts, etc., essentially anything that is internet addressable) using their own vocabulary so that it is easy for them to refind that information again. The folksonomy is most often also social so that others that use the same vocabulary will be able to find the object as well. It is important to note that folksonomies work best when the tags used to describe objects are in the common vocabulary and not what a person perceives others will call it (the tool works like no other for personal information management of information on the web, but is also shared with the world to help others find the information). http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1635

Links:

• Wikipedia article
• Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

Folksonomies applied:

• delicious
• Flickr

-- ArthurClemens - 31 Mar 2005

This looks very interesting and a natural fit with wikis. Also seems like it should be fairly simple to implement on at least a basic level. (Seems like it would involve little more than adding a "keyword" field inwhich users could add any tag they wish.) The trickier part, and a large part of the value, would be in designing mechanism for indexing and browsing the tags.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 31 Mar 2005

There is a difference between just page tagging (adding keywords to the page) and folksonomies. With folksnonomies, users have their own perspective on the content, and these separate perspectives can lead to wildly different keywords for the same content. See also the article mentioned above.

I have tried to create a diagram of the differences:

Large public sites with different users (user groups) are probably best served with a folksonomy type keyword system. More recall, less precision.

Intranets with a smaller specialized public are better served with keyword control: it becomes more important to find all documents on a subject: less recall, more precision.

In any case, adding keywords is better than having no keywords at all.

-- ArthurClemens - 01 Apr 2005

Article about hierarchies, facets and tags: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags

-- ArthurClemens - 03 Aug 2005

Deprecated: use Folksonomy