T4- FOLKSONOMIES: DIGITAL COLLABORATIVE CLASSIFICATION AND TAGGING

CONTENT INDEX

1. Concept of folksonomy
2. Cooperative tagging/classi cation 3.
3. Forms of digital collaborative tagging CONCEPT OF FOLKSONOMY

CONCEPT OF FOLKSONOMY
- The term folksonomy was coined in 2004 by the information architect Thomas Vander Wal.
- Folksonomies can be considered as taxonomies created by users:
o Users provide tags to information pieces, including articles, images, websites and many
other resources and objects.
o Tags are used for personal management, sharing and retrieval. o Users can organize
their own content in a way that makes sense to them.

- User generated taxonomies contrast with professionally created ontologies in traditional

knowledge organization.

DEFINITION
- The term folksonomy is a contraction of the words folk (people) and taxonomy (a system for
classifying things).
- It can be de ned as a way to organize online objects (documents, resources…) by users, who
freely add tags or keywords in natural language to describe their content and represent their
subject. Therefore, a folksonomy is an user-de ned collection of metadata.
- Folksonomy ≈ collaborative tagging, social classi cation, social indexing, social tagging.
COOPERATIVE TAGGING/CLASSIFICATION

▪ TAGS are keywords or terms assigned to a piece of information.

▪ They help describing an item.
▪ They improve ndability by browsing or searching informally.
▪ Tagging becomes popular in Web 2.0 sites and services.
▪ It is part of popular apps, web services, database systems, desktop applications, and operating
systems.
▪ Numerous examples of social tagging can be found in a variety of social media sites such as
Pinterest or X (former Twitter), among many others.

- Social tags are labels created by users.

- Tag interpretation should allow other users predicting e ciently the contents of labelled
documents.
- Interpretation of contents by others might provide clues to collectively discover new topics.
- Tags are important in exploratory search and for the re nement of the information search
strategy. Examples: Blog | Database.
- Folksonomies are characterized by a rapid increase in number and diversity of tags, including
an increase of incoherent tags representing information resources in the system.
- Tags are an open and unstructured annotation mechanism.

LIMITS for cooperative tagging/classi cation:

• Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human behavior and the principle of least e ort: An Introduction to Human
Ecology. Addison-Wesley Press.
• An information seeker will tend to optimize search methods in the least e ort mode available.
Example: Google basic search.
• Information seeking behavior will stop as soon as minimally acceptable results are found,
regardless of the user’s pro ciency as a searcher, or their level of subject expertise. Example:
Google result pages.
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 • The user's previous experience in searching for information should be taken into account.
Example: User interface or query language.

ADVANTAGES of Social Tagging

• Browsability: a browsing strategy is extremely fruitful using social tags and folksonomies to nd
web resources that are of interest to them and people who have common interests.
• Tagging directly represents the vocabulary of users, because they are the ones creating the
metadata. Popular tags show us what terms are preferred by the group. MeSH example.
• Classi cation of large amounts of content at low cost: Tagging distributes the responsibility
and increases productivity.
• Current and exible: Users can tag and untag data whenever they want with speed and ease,
meaning that folksonomies remain current and re ect current viewpoints.
• Community: Interaction of the people in accessing social tagging site indicates virtual
community. Taggers can see who else shares their interests and their vocabulary.

DISADVANTAGES of Social Tagging

• Lack of control: social tagging always allows people to tag freely, giving rise to phenomena
such as synonymy (group ; set), polysemy (bank – river ; bank – nancial institution), di erent
level of detail/precision (social media vs social networks), etc.
• Lack of recall: if we search for tags using the term “folksonomy" will not retrieve items tagged
with synonyms, thus only nding a small fraction of the information available on the topic.
• Lack of precision: users may not have tagged items with relevant tags, or tagged too broadly,
or tagged in such a way that is too personal, providing the user with irrelevant material.
• Syntax: there is no standard way of creating multi-word tags. Di erent taggers employ di erent
strategies (underscores, dashes, hyphens or blending words), making searching di cult.

FORMS OF DIGITAL COLLABORATIVE TAGGING

LIBRARYTHING:
• LibraryThing is completely free web-based service.
• Add books, movies and music from Amazon, the Library of Congress and 4,941 other libraries.
• Early Reviewers program o ers over 3,000 free, early-release books every month.
• A warm and welcoming community of nearly three million book lovers.
• Find your new favorite book with personalized recommendations.
• See detailed charts and stats about your library and reading life.
• Track your reading progress, rate and review.
• Join groups and talk with other book lovers
• Apps for iPhone and Android.

FORMS OF DIGITAL COLLABORATIVE TAGGING

-TIZMOS
-DIIGO
-FLICKER
-PINTEREST
-WAKELET
-BIBSONOMY
-EVERNOTE
-INSTAPAPER
-DIGG
-REDDIT
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