Folksonomy

= Folksonomy = toc The term folksonomy originated in 2004 during an online discussion of what to name the tags assigned to bookmarks in Delicious and Furl, and photographs in Flickr. One participant asked about “user-defined or tags to organize and share information.... Is there a name for this kind of informal social classification?" One suggestion was "folk classification" and soon thereafter [|Thomas Vander Wal] responded with, "So the user-created bottom-up categorical structure development with an emergent thesaurus would become a Folksonomy?" Thus was created the portmanteau word folksonomy by combining folk with taxonomy.

A folksonomy is often defined as an ad hoc labeling and tagging system. This informal tagging is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services. Social tagging or bookmarking is performed on numerous online social sharing sites such as Delicious, Flickr, Diigo and many others where users share bookmarks, articles, photographs and other information objects. These systems allow open tagging without the restrictions of established subject heading or keyword rules. They are extremely popular because they do not require any training and allow people to assign tags or keywords with terms that they personally use to categorize information objects.

History
A limited amount of keyword tagging was used by a few people on documents stored and shared on early BBS systems beginning in the early 1990s. These were generally in the form kw:tagname. Delicious (del.icio.us at that time) started up in 2003 with social bookmarking involving tagging. Soon thereafter, in 2004 Flickr originated and began allowing use of tags by users to label photos. From 2005 on, the use of tagging spread rapidly to include numerous sites and services from Furl to Technorati to Last.fm and onwards.

Contrast of folksonomies and formal cataloging systems
Formal library cataloging is based on established principles and rules. There are to formal hierarchical and professional taxonomies and ontologies to guide the user in assigning keywords and subject headings. These limit choices and the goal of the cataloger is to assign a limited number of particular correct headings. Organizing information through tagging systems lead to ambiguity of meaning through synonyms creating redundancy. One word tags also lead to ambiguity as the same word may have multiple meanings. By contrast folksonomies are wide open and the use of any term is completely up to the individual user. However, as numerous individuals tag shared content over time there comes to be a certain amount of informal agreement on most appropriate tags for an item. Gene Smith described this as “the most popular tags floating to the top.” While there is usually no active collaboration in assigning tags, users of a system using tags can see and reuse tags assigned by others. The larger the system becomes, the more stable the distribution of tags,media type="custom" key="11723940" align="right" with a high percentage of common tags for a particular object and a more limited number of outliers and tags unique to individuals.

Tagging allows for more flexible categorizing. Items can be assigned to any number of subjects and they can be searched for by any of the assigned terms in addition to text. Tags solved the problem of categorizing on computers. There is no need to store files in multiple folders, they can simply be tagged by any term the user might find useful.

Since digital objects, unlike physical books or files, do not need to be in only one location, they open up the possibility of organizing by many criteria, and in ways that may be individual to a particular user. Folksonomies as social categorizing systems can lead to a huge amount of organization at virtually no cost. They are extremely valuable in classifying, organizing and making material on the web findable.

While any individuals tags may not make as much sense compared to a formal classification scheme, when a large groups tags are combined on a bookmarking site such as Delicious, the resulting folksonomy is highly valuable. A large amount of information can be attached to the object. In general the value to users of the information is easy to perceive by looking at a tag cloud, where the most commonly used tags are also generally the most appropriate.

Folksonomies allow for individual differences of opinion. Thus multiple users could tag the same book as religion, mythology, heresy, or cult all according to their own views, and without forcing those views on others. Compare this media type="custom" key="11723820" align="right" to the Dewey Decimal System’s well known difficulty and bias with classifying religious texts.

Common Uses
Folksonomies are used in commercial sites such as Amazon where shoppers can tag interesting items. They are common on citation management sites such as Zotero and Mendeley. LibraryThing, a social cataloging web application allows both tagging and LOC subject headings, although tags appear on the main book page and subject headings are under “book details.” Geotagging for location of images and places related to information went through a variety of different syntaxes before one became most common as people gravitated towards it. Machine-tags are used on sites such as flickr, especially when associated with organized groups that can benefit from machine readable tags. A tiny sampling of the many popular websites that use tagging and hence folksonomies as a major feature of their services include:

[|Delicious] [|Flickr] [|43 Things] [|CiteULike] [|Connotea] [|LibraryThing] [|Technorati] [|YouTube] Mendeley (link) [|Zotero]

Examples of Current Use in Libraries
As a number of small libraries have chosen to use sites such as LibraryThing for cataloging due to very low cost and ease of use, they have also begun participating in tagging and contributing to folksonomies. There is also ongoing debate on incorporating folksonomies with traditional cataloging techniques in libraries. One academic library has begun to use both LC subject headings and alternative tagging in the online catalog--PennTags at the University of Pennsylvania. PennTags are intended for use by the University of Pennsylvania community to tag events and news items. However, individuals can also use PennTags on records in the online catalog. Folksonomy terms exist side by side with the LCSH headings (PennTags, 2007), although they are not yet prevalent in the catalog. Citation and sharing applications such as Zotero and Mendelay used by students and academics (including librarians) already use tagging systems, creating folksonomies within disciplines.

Future Possibilities
“Standardized cataloging is crucial for communication between computer systems, but patrons now have an expectation of social interaction on the Internet, as evidenced by the popularity of folksonomy.” “With the use of such expanded guidelines and links to useful external reference sources, folksonomies could serve as a very powerful and flexible tool for increasing the user-friendliness and interactivity of public library catalogs, and also may be useful for encouraging other activities, such as informal online communities of readers and user-driven readers' advisory services.”.