Folksonomy

Folksonomy is the informal labeling, or “tagging,” of Web-based content by users for the purposes of personal retrieval, communal sharing, or both. Since it almost always occurs in a social environment, where tags can be viewed by and shared with other users, folksonomy is often considered a form of social tagging. Typically, folksonomy allows a user to tag content and then find other content with the same tags or other users who have used the same tags. Thus it can offer a unique means of searching a network space and finding or building communities of users with similar vocabularies and interests. The Web-services most often cited as exemplars of folksonomy are del.icio.us.com and flickr.com.

The term “folksonomy” was coined by the blogger Thomas Vanderwal in 2004. It is a combination of the words “folk” and “taxonomy,” and thus it can be understood to mean “taxonomy by the people.” In an important sense, however, the meaning of “folksonomy” is in direct opposition to that of “taxonomy.” Where the latter signifies classification by a single, pre-determined authority using strictly defined categories and a controlled vocabulary (as in traditional library cataloging), with folksonomy there are myriad authorities, and the categories and vocabulary are whatever they decide to create and employ.

It is important to note that there is controversy over the exact meaning of “folksonomy.” While Vanderwal coined the term to signify individual-generated tagging for the sake of one’s own, personal retrieval purposes, the term has come to signify, to some, all instances of user-generated tagging, including collaborative tagging. Thus the Wikipedia definition reads: “A folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize (Web) content.” Vanderwal, in another blog entry, expressly rejects this definition, insisting that folksonomic tagging is individual, not collaborative, and that, strictly speaking, it is distinct from categorizing. Another blogger, called Yoono (blog.yoono.com), noting the many and often conflicting definitions, distills them along Wikipedia’s lines: “a method of categorizing information in a collaborative and decentralized way.” Thus it appears that many proponents of folksonomy appreciate its communal and collaborative aspects most, and have come to define it in those terms. But even Yoono disagrees with those who insist that folksonomy necessarily involves tagging, claiming that there can be bookmark-based folksonomies, too.

It remains to be seen, then, what “folksonomy” will come to mean in the future, especially as the very phenomenon it was coined to describe continues to develop. At this point, though, it does seem that most of the internet-critics discussing folksonomy are most concerned with, and excited by, the community and discovery opporunities it creates through sharing.

Regardless of how it is defined, folksonomy has several evident drawbacks and benefits. The drawbacks include the absence of controlled vocabularies and categorical hierarchies – that is, the absence of everything traditional indexes and catalogs provide. Thus folksonomy allows for polysemy (where a single word has multiple meanings), synonyms (where multiple words have the same or similar meanings), and “meta-noise” (idiosyncratic tags that are meaningless to most users), all of which burden the system and encumber the search and retrieval processes. The absence of controlled vocabularies also makes it difficult for a searcher to find content that is tagged in terms with which he is unfamiliar. Lastly, many doubt the effectiveness that folksonomy would have in more complex systems.

The main benefits of folksonomy are, first, that it can generate metadata for enormous amounts of content that would take information professionals much more time and resources to catalog formally. Second, that it fosters the engagement of individuals with content and with other individuals, thereby creating opportunities for discovery and the formation of communities. And third, that it effectively classifies content with a vocabulary that, though uncontrolled, is nevertheless more meaningful to common users. The open-endedness of the tagging process also allows the vocabulary to adapt to changing understandings, meanings, and interests.

Acknowledging the benefits of both folksonomy and formal taxonomy, some critics have envisioned a compromise between the two. The Wikipedia article on folksonomy suggests a collaboration between professional catalogers, with their controlled vocabularies, and regular users, with their informal tags. It calls the result of such collaboration a “collabulary,” describing it thus:

“A team of classification experts collaborates with content consumers to create rich, but more systematic content tagging systems. A collabulary arises much the way a folksonomy does, but it is developed in a spirit of collaboration with experts in the field. The result is a system that combines the benefits of folksonomies -- low entry costs, a rich vocabulary that is broadly shared and comprehensible by the user base, and the capacity to respond quickly to language change -- without the errors that inevitably arise in naive, unsupervised folksonomies.”