Folksonomy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Folksonomy, a portmanteau word that combines "folk" and "taxonomy," refers to the on-the-fly classifications (called tags or keywords) that Internet users freely invent to categorize the objects with which they interact online. Social software makes these classifications available to other Internet users,^[1] often by means of a tag cloud, a list of user-developed tags. For this reason, folksonomy can be viewed as a distributed classification system. Examples of folksonomy-enabled social software include Furl, Flickr, and Del.icio.us. Synonyms include tagging and social bookmarking.

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 References
7 External Links

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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" appeared in del.icio.us in late 2003 and were quickly replicated in other social software.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.^[2]

Although folk taxonomies are culturally provided and far less amenable to individual invention, they are similar, in one sense, to folksonomies: while folksonomies express an individual's classifications of online objects, and therefore contain information about the individual, folk taxonomies express an entire culture's classification of biological objects, and therefore contain information about the culture.

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