Folksonomy

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A folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts as well. The process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us, although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of folksonomy.[1]

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: when faced with the choice of the search tools that Web sites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favor of tools that are created by 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.

Contents

[edit] Practical evaluation

[edit] Advantages

In contrast to professionally-developed taxonomies with controlled vocabularies, folksonomies dramatically lower content categorization costs for casual users of content, because there is no hierarchically organized nomenclature to learn. One simply makes tags up on the fly.

Moreover, folksonomies are inherently open-ended and can therefore respond quickly to changes, innovations and fads in the way users categorize Internet content. Like other commons-based peer production systems, such as open source software development and Wikis like Wikipedia, the participating individuals possess varying levels of tagging sophistication. This production process may produce results that compare favorably to the professionally designed systems but no definitive studies have shown this to be true.[2]

Folksonomic categories appear to some as hopelessly idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, in some contexts, this may be beneficial. A folksonomic category arises from an individual's engagement with the tagged content, such that it makes the created category personal. Folksonomies therefore convey multiple levels of information; both about the content, and about the people who create and review it. Consequently, idiosyncratic classification schemes, no matter how bizarre or unconventional, may still have utility to a small subset of other users who agree with them. (See also, Long tail). Moreover, the critique of "inconsistency" may represent an exaggerated perception of uniformity in comparison to formal and academic classification schemes, which are also subject to criticism and inconsistent application even among highly trained researchers.

[edit] Criticisms

Critics and information scientists suggest that the unsystematic methodology of folksomic tagging may be unreliable and inconsistent. Such inconsistencies may arise from: 1) polysemy (words which have multiple related meanings; for example, a window can be a hole or a sheet of glass); 2) synonyms, multiple words with the same or similar meanings (tv and television, or Netherlands/Holland/Dutch); and 3) word inflections (such as with plural forms, "cat" versus "cats").[3] In addition, folksonomies all but invite deliberately idiosyncratic tagging, called meta noise, which burdens users and decreases the systems 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 were a lemmatization engine behind the tag entry forms.

For the purposes of workflow, metadata tags need to be defined in a formal way at the time of scripting or programming. If tags are informally defined, continually changing and not governed it will be impossible to use the metadata so constructed to automate workflow and business process.

Idiosyncratic folksonomic classification, although considered beneficial by some, is also viewed by others as a distinct limitation. People with similar methods of classifying things may act to reinforce each others biases and pre-existing viewpoints. Folksonomies are routinely generated by people who may have spent a great deal of time interacting with the content they tag. This level of interaction may impair objectivity or perspective to properly describe content in relation to items they are not as familiar with or know nothing about.

For example, items tagged as "Web 2.0" represent a dizzying array of seemingly inconsistent and contradictory resources.[4] The lack of a hierarchical or systematic structure for the tagging system makes the terms relevant to what they are describing, but they often fail to show their relevancy or relationship to other objects of the same or similar type.

[edit] Origin

The term folksonomy is generally attributed to Thomas Vander Wal[5], 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.[6] According to Vander Wal, a folksonomy is "tagging that works". Practical examples of Folksonomy would involve internet culture phenomenon such as Myspace and Xanga.

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).[7]

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Potential compromise between folksonomies and top-down taxonomies

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It is possible that the differences between taxonomies and folksonomies have been overestimated. [8] 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 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.

Another possible solution is a taxonomy-directed-folksonomy, which relies on the user interfaces to suggest tags from a formal taxonomy, but allows many users to use their own tags.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Vanderwal, T. (2006). "Folksonomy Research Needs Cleaning Up."
  2. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (2006)."Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study: Britannica hits back at junk science." The Register. Retrieved on 2006-12-11.
  3. ^ Golder, Scott A. Huberman, Bernardo A. (2005). "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems." Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs. Visited November 24, 2005.
  4. ^ O'Reilly, Tim (2005) "What is Web 2.0" O'Reilly.com. O'Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved on 2006-12-11.
  5. ^ Vanderwal, T. (2005). "Off the Top: Folksonomy Entries." Visited November 5, 2005. See also: Smith, Gene. “Atomiq: Folksonomy: social classification.” Aug 3, 2004. Retrieved January 1, 2007 from [1].
  6. ^ M. Koivunen, Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Annotation.
  7. ^ Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  8. ^ Kipp M, Campbell DG (2006). "Patterns and inconsistencies in collaborative tagging systems: an examination of tagging practices.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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