A
folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing
tagsIn online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
to annotate and
categorizeCategorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge...
contentIn media production and publishing, content is information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content may be delivered via any medium such as the internet, television, and audio CDs, as well as live events such as conferences and stage performances...
; this practice is also known as
collaborative tagging,
social classification,
social indexing, and
social tagging.
Folksonomy, a term coined by
Thomas Vander WalThomas Vander Wal is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy". He is also known for initiating the term "infocloud"...
, is a portmanteau of
folkThe English word Folk is derived from a Germanic noun, *fulka meaning "people" or "army"...
and
taxonomyTaxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
.
Folksonomies became popular on the
WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
around 2004 as part of
social softwareSocial software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...
applications such as
social bookmarkingSocial bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
and photograph annotation.
TaggingIn online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
, which is one of the defining characteristics of
Web 2.0The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include
tag cloudA tag cloud is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text. 'Tags' are usually single words, and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or color...
s as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy. A good example of a social website that utilizes folksonomy is
43 Things43 Things is a social networking website that is built on the principles of tagging, rather than creating explicit interpersonal links . Users create accounts and then list a number of goals or hopes; these goals are parsed by a lexer and connected to other people's goals that are constructed with...
.
An empirical analysis of the complex dynamics of tagging systems, published in 2007, has shown that consensus around stable distributions and shared vocabularies does emerge, even in the absence of a central controlled vocabulary. For content to be searchable, it should be categorized and grouped. While this was believed to require commonly agreed on sets of content describing tags (much like keywords of a journal article), recent research has found that, in large folksonomies, common structures also emerge on the level of categorizations.
Accordingly, it is possible to devise mathematical models that allow for translating from personal tag vocabularies (personomies) to the vocabulary shared by most users.
External links
- SocialTagging.org provides short definitions of some key terms related to tagging and folksonomies