A folksonomy is an integrative technique
"A folksonomy is an integrative technique used for organising online content. The technique works through allowing content to be indexed in a multi-taxonomic manner. While a taxonomy unifies content through compliance to a single common ontology (index system), a folksonomy integrates content through the juxtaposition and intersection of various taxonomies (index systems). With a folksonomy content within a web site (digital photos, mp3 audio files, 'podcasts' etc.) can attract multiple indexes that are able to contest and collide with each other. Information producers and consumers can assign keyword tags to content according to their own ontological frameworks (without the need for an agreed compliance). In this way folksonomies are able to respond to generative and associative impulses. They provide a means for integrating heterogeneous content based on a principle of good company rather than on a logic of compliance and unity."
(Simon Perkins, 31 July 2008, unpublished PhD thesis)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
"Although a folksonomy is not a controlled vocabulary, and certainly does have limitations, there are important strengths that are important to understanding the appeal and utility of such systems.
Browsing vs. Finding
The first is serendipity. While the controlled vocabulary issues discussed above may hamper findability, browsing the system and its interlinked related tag sets is wonderful for finding things unexpectedly in a general area. In researching this paper, exploring the bookmarks tagged with 'folksonomy' on Delicious, there were many recent resources from a wide variety of authors and sites that I likely would never have been exposed to.
There is a fundamental difference in the activities of browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is similar to the difference between exploring a problem space to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for answers to specifically formulated questions. Information seeking behavior varies based on context. While one could evaluate a folksonomy in a system like Delicious or Flickr by using specific queries from users, and then evaluating which documents tagged with keywords they choose are relevant to the query, that would ignore the broader set of browsing activities that the system seems to be stronger in. Measuring the utility of that aspect would likely require qualitative research in the form of interviews or ethnographic study of users, and is an area of further study. It would also require comparisons not to search based information retrieval systems, but to browsing activities using other categorization and classification schemes."
(Adam Mathes, December 2004)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Flickr Hive Mind: The World's Best Photos on 2008-10-17
"Flickr Hive Mind is a search engine as well as an experiment in the power of Folksonomies. All thumbnail images come directly from Flickr, none are stored on Flickr Hive Mind. ... Flickr Hive Mind uses the Flickr API."
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Broad and Narrow Folksonomies
"The broad folksonomy has many people tagging the same object and every person can tag the object with their own tags in their own vocabulary. This lends itself very easy to applying the power law curve (power curve) and/or net effect to the results of many people tagging. The power terms and the long tail both work.
From a high level we see a person creates the object (content) and makes it accessible to others. Other people (groups of people with the same vocabulary represented people blobs and noted with alphabet letters) tag the object (lines with arrows pointing away from the people) with their own terms (represented by numbers). The people also find the information (arrows on lines pointing from the numeric tags back to the people blobs) based on the tags."
(Thomas Vander Wal)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Understanding Folksonomy (Tagging that Works)
"Thomas Vander Wal will provide an overview on tagging services and outline where there is value in tagging. This will focus on what is different in folksonomy that improves upon tagging, so that it becomes a powerful tool. Thomas will provides insights to help answer when to use tagging and/or categories, who should be tagging, the value of a tagcloud (or lack of value) when used properly, and how to create value from tagging to improve the sites and services we build."
(Thomas Vander Wal, 8 September 2006)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
