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altWhat is Folksonomy

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.Folksonomy (from folk + taxonomy) is a user-generated taxonomy.

Suntel Enterprise Folksonomy

Folksonomies are not limited to the geek world or to the blogosphere. Enterprises have also started blogging and experimenting with folksonomies. An example is IBM's Intranet that serves 315,000 IBM employees worldwide in different languages and with multiple roles and information needs. While actually using a controlled taxonomy, they have announced to start experimenting with folksonomy to keep information updated and organized following their users' personal way of accessing the system.

In the direction of facing the intrinsic precision loss of folksonomies, Jess McMullin proposes to complement social classification with other classification approaches automated keyword extraction, tag suggestions built into the tagging tool as the tag is typed [see Google Suggest and Ajax technology], mapping ad-hoc tags to structured facets, and top-down classification oversight by information professionals.

Large corporations are often made of independent silos unable to communicate with each other and not sharing a common vocabulary. The same thing can have different names in different silos. A typical argument against the introduction of folksonomies in a corporate environment is that their use as a basis for retrieving documents from corporate archives would still require a common language, a shared vocabulary, spoken by the entire company, allowing the use of a well-defined label or set of labels for every article. This is not true: while the vocabulary is not the same, people are classifying the same real things underlying the terms used to name them. This knowledge allows the creation of a mapped folksonomy between the language of individuals and the corporate language as a sort of synonym ring. Every user will retrieve documents using the terms of their specific vocabulary that the system would match to the corporate vocabulary.

Some History

Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications including social bookmarking and annotating photographs. Tagging, which is characteristic of Web 2.0 services, allows non-expert users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.

Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, although they are also used in other contexts. Aggregating the tags of many users creates a folksonomy.Aggregation is the pulling together of all of the tags in an automated way.Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and Delicious, although Flickr may not be a good example of folksonomy.

As folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can discover who used a given tag and see the other tags that this person has used. In this way, folksonomy users can discover the tag sets of another user who tends to interpret and tag content in a way that makes sense to them. The result can be a rewarding gain in the user's capacity to find related content (a practice known as "pivot browsing"). Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: when faced with the choice of the search tools that Web sites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favor of tools that are created by the community.

Folksonomy creation and searching tools are not part of the underlying World Wide Web protocols. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs, or to collaboratively label existing content, such as Web sites, books, works in the scientific and scholarly literatures, and blog entries.