Pool 1

Folksonomy; the Emerging Infrastructure of Socially-Based Information Societies

Daniel J. Pool
LIS 5033
The complexity of an information infrastructure is directly proportional to the medium
being organized (Bates 1999). Throughout history this has evolved from an oral tradition
allowing only for a one-to-one exchange to today's digital frontier in which a one-to-many is
globally and instantly possible (Hedstrom and King 2006). However as information containers
becomes more copious and fragmented with the rise in digital content so too have the
organization systems that present them. To cope with the rising amount of user created content
flooding the information marketplace content providers have provided several social based
indexing tools called folksonomies to arrange and store information (Kiu and Tsui 2011). The
question arises, is this new practice a hindrance or advancement in information science? To
better understand this emerging infrastructure tool and its place in library science one must
understand the development, use, and future of folksonomy infrastructure.
To begin, library and information science applies practical theories of organization to
make the storage and retrieval of data more accessible (Bates 1999). Information infrastructure is
the process of information transfer. Folksonomy was developed as an infrastructure by content
creators publishing information to the internet (Fichter 2006).
Creating and storing the information online was more or less effortless however finding
and retrieving that information was audacious to even proficient users. To solve this issue, and
without the aid of professional indexers, the content creators began adding information to their
sites to tag or define the subject matter of the content (Reamy 2009). More recently social
media has been added to the equation in order to place seemingly unlike items together (Fichter
Pool 2
2006).
This is much like the history of epistemic infrastructure for institutions such as museums
and libraries that grew out of private collections (Hedstrom and King 2006). These haphazard
gathering of oddities became deliberate systematic practices to organize objects into accessible
collections. By grouping similar objects together they created systematic order that later became
traditions. Like the history of the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University which started as a
private individuals collection and grew into a modern museum.
This is not unlike the changing information infrastructure of today. Users create content
that is then synthesized by a community into topical groupings (Yoo, Choi, Suh and Kim 2006).
These information containers are then further grouped by the kind of people who use them
(Fichter 2006), what was used before and after them (Kiu and Tsui 2011), and how they are
tagged or indexed by their creators. This can be seen by sites like Amazon that present items that
are commonly used or discussed in tandem with an object being looked at online. For example
two books may have nothing to do with one another but if they are commonly bought together or
by the same social community then they will presented to a user as being associated.
This reflects the common trend in todays information infrastructure to be A) market
oriented (Hedstrom and King 2006) and B) have a social element (Fichter 2006). Creating a
digital hive mind has been a goal of many digital pioneers that uses crowd sourced wisdom to
fill in the intellectual gaps that independently produced content can create. The idea that taking
authoritative information experts out of the picture in order to facilitate a less rigid system of
intellectual control.
The only problem being that whether its a few dozen or million people attempting to
catalogue information without the proper training only add to the confusion within the
Pool 3
classification of any information. Bates (1999) comments that there is an invisible infrastructure
behind the scenes of online content that guides the process of organization. That the very
structures that make folksonomy possible are actually created by the structure that most pro-
folksonomists argue it helps distance them from as Reamy (2009) explains. This means that
social indexing is not a means of bypassing the information institution but is rather perpetuated
by it.
The reason it can seem like information science does not have a part in folksonomy is
because how well it works with the existing infrastructure. Being that one does not need to be a
subject matter expert in order to classify the basic idea of an article (Bates 1999) it is not
necessary to have a great deal of training in a subject to tag it to a specific area. This also works
well into the market oriented (Hedstrom and King 2006) direction of todays information
systems.
To better understand the use of folksonomy in todays information infrastructure it is
easier to think of an application in use. An excellent example of the social-indexing trend is the
content platform Twitter. The site allows users to micro-blog or write short messages of up to
140 characters long and publish them online. Each message or Tweet is then compiled into the
feed of those following that content creator. These messages can also be seen when other users
retweet or republish content or when someone searches for any content that was indexed with
keywords that the content creator added to a message through the use of hashtags. The tags
take the place of a practices like record headings in traditional information systems.
The value added by a system like this is that it allows for a high discoverability. Users of
similar socioeconomic and psychotechnical cohorts will likely use the same language to look for
similar information. Fichter (2006) discusses how this system creates feedback into the
Pool 4
information infrastructure that makes the content actively easier to find for individuals. This only
makes sense as users looking for the same kind of information define, tag, and republish content
it feeds back into the system creating more like-minded content using the same language.
The drawback to folksonomy however is its strength--people. However useful being able
to find a specific article or video at the moment your personal socioeconomic group is using it if
you are unable to find it years later then it is lost. The problem is that language changes and so
too the words people use to describe something. This stems from the fact that folksonomy
keywords are flat descriptors (Reamy 2009). Infact, folksonomies are not classification systems
at all. This makes them unreliable as they simply take keywords and represent them to users (Kiu
and Tsui 2011).
In this way folksonomy infrastructure is to classification as anarchy is to government.
Both examples are systematic forms of structure by their nature of non-structure. In many ways
folksonomy is information anarchy as it is a free-for-all indexing system with no true rules or
restrictions in how to use it. However unlike anarchy, folksonomy can serve a constructive
purpose.
The internet has given the world access to what is seemingly limitless potential to share
information. In many ways users are only restricted by their imagination and technology. This
has given way to an unprecedented amount of information being created. Much like the ability to
print books cheaply lead to a rise in literacy so too has the digital age lead to a rise in content
creation (Hedstrom and King 2006). With little to no oversight in the private content creation and
indexing there is an enormous amount of information to search through for users of the web.
This is what folksonomy excels at, processing huge amounts of data into usable chunks of data
(Yoo, Choi, Suh and Kim 2006).
Pool 5
By combining the invisible infrastructure of information (Bates 1999) and combining it
with structure folksonomies (Yoo, Choi, Suh and Kim 2006) it is possible to create a living
taxonomy that can classify information as fast as it can be created. Combining the taxonomy and
folksonomy systems allows for improved retrieval and enhanced content management while
preserving flexibility needed into todays infrastructure (Kiu and Tsui 2011).
Yoo, Choi, Suh and Kim (2006) lay out the framework for just such an infrastructure by
allowing users to define objects with keywords but also chose a best fit term from a structured
taxonomy. The system then takes the responses of the group and creates the items classification
while staying within a rigid semantic system. By working both systems into the cognitive
framework of the larger taxonomy they were able to preserve the usefulness of both systems
without the expense of having an indexer catalogue each item. This allowed subject matter
experts to work with the information while allowing the information experts to work behind the
scenes.
In conclusion, folksonomy is not a fad of information infrastructure. It is now a part of
the system. It is not a replacement, revolution, or alternative. Folksonomy is simply the next
logical step in indexing driven by the psychotechnological advancements of our information
society. The future of folksonomy is being adopted into the infrastructure of information.

Pool 6

Biblography

Bates, Marcia. "The Invisible Substance of Information Science." Journal of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology 50, no. 12 (October 1999): 1043.
Fichter, D. "Intranet librarian. Intranet applications for tagging and folksonomies." Information
Today 30, no. 3 (May 30, 2006): 43-45.
Hedstrom, Margaret, and John L. King. Epistemic Infrastructure in the Rise of the Knowledge
Economy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Kiu, Ching-Chieh, and Tsui, Eric . "TaxoFolk: A hybrid taxonomyfolksonomy structure for
knowledge classification and navigation." Expert Systems With Applications 38, no. 5
(2011): 6049-58.
Reamy, Tom. "Folksonomy Folktales." KM World 18, no. 9 (October 2009): 6-8.
Yoo, Donghee, Keunho Choi, Yongmoo Suh, and Gunwoo Kim. "Building and evaluating a
collaboratively built structured folksonomy." Journal of Information Science 39.5 (2013):
593-607.