| Folksonomy |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT COLLABORATIVE TAGGING | |
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| web 2.0 neologisms | |
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Collaborative tagging became popular on The Web around 2004 with Social Software applications such as Social Bookmarking or annotating phorographs. Websites that support tagging and the principle of folksonomy, are refered to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and new tagging data is used in new ways to find information. For instance Tag Cloud s are frequently used to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. Typically, folksonomies are Internet -based, although they are also used in other contexts. 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 Del.icio.us , although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of folksonomy.Vanderwal, T. (2006). " Folksonomy Research Needs Cleaning Up ." As folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can discover (generally) who created a given folksonomy tag, and see the other tags that this person created. In this way, folksonomy users often discover the tag sets of another user who tends to interpret and tag content in a way that makes sense to them. The result is often an immediate and rewarding gain in the user's capacity to find related content. 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 special 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. PRACTICAL EVALUATION Critics and Information Scientists suggest that the unsystematic methodology of folksomic tagging may be unreliable and inconsistent. Such inconsistencies may arise from: # '' Polysemy '' (words which have multiple related meanings; for example, a window can be a hole or a sheet of glass); # '' Synonym s'', multiple words with the same or similar meanings (tv and television, or Netherlands/Holland/Dutch); and # word Inflection s (such as with plural forms, "cat" versus "cats").Golder, Scott A. Huberman, Bernardo A. (2005). " The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems ." Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs. Visited November 24, 2005. In addition, folksonomies all but invite deliberately idiosyncratic tagging, called Meta Noise , which burdens users and decreases the systems information retrieval utility. Those who prefer top-down taxonomies/ontologies argue that an agreed set of tags enables more efficient indexing and searching of content. At least different word Inflection s could be avoided, if there were a Lemmatization engine behind the tag entry forms. For the purposes of Workflow , Metadata tags need to be defined in a formal way at the time of scripting or programming. If tags are informally defined, continually changing and not governed it will be impossible to use the metadata so constructed to automate workflow and business process. Idiosyncratic folksonomic classification, although considered beneficial by some, is also viewed by others as a distinct limitation. People with similar methods of classifying things may act to reinforce each others biases and pre-existing viewpoints. Folksonomies are routinely generated by people who may have spent a great deal of time interacting with the content they tag. This level of interaction may impair objectivity or perspective to properly describe content in relation to items they are not as familiar with or know nothing about. For example, items tagged as ", Inc. Retrieved on 2006-12-11 . The lack of a hierarchical or systematic structure for the tagging system makes the terms relevant to what they are describing, but they often fail to show their relevancy or relationship to other objects of the same or similar type. ORIGIN The term ''folksonomy'' is generally attributed to of the words '' Folk '' (or ''folks'') and '' Taxonomy '' that specifically refers to subject indexing systems created within Internet Communities . Before collaborative tagging became popular on the web there had been attempts and experiments like the World Wide Web Consortium 's Annotea project with user-generated tags in 2002.M. Koivunen, Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Annotation . According to Vander Wal, a folksonomy is "tagging that works". Folksonomy should be distinguished from Folk Taxonomy , a cultural practice that has been widely documented in anthropological work. Folk taxonomies are culturally supplied, intergenerationally transmitted, and relatively stable classification systems that people in a given culture use to make sense of the entire world around them (not just the Internet ).Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification. Princeton: Princeton University Press. FOLKSONOMY AND THE SEMANTIC WEB Folksonomy may hold the key to developing a Semantic Web , in which every Web page contains machine-readable Metadata that describes its content. Such metadata would dramatically improve the Precision (the percentage of relevant documents) in Search Engine retrieval lists. However, it is difficult to see how the large and varied community of Web page authors could be persuaded to add Metadata to their pages in a consistent, reliable way; web authors who wish to do so experience high entry costs because metadata systems are time-consuming to learn and use. For this reason, few Web authors make use of the simple Dublin Core metadata standard, even though the use of Dublin Core meta- Tags could increase their pages' prominence in Search Engine Retrieval Lists . In contrast to more formalized, top-down classifications using Controlled Vocabularies , folksonomy is a distributed classification system with low entry costs. FOLKSONOMY IN THE ENTERPRISE Since folksonomies are user-generated and therefore inexpensive to implement, advocates of folksonomy believe that it provides a useful low-cost alternative to more traditional, institutionally supported Taxonomies or Controlled Vocabularies . An employee-generated folksonomy could therefore be seen as an "emergent Enterprise Taxonomy ". David R.Millen et al (2006). "Dogear - Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise" Some folksonomy advocates believe that it is useful in facilitating Workplace Democracy and the distribution of Management tasks among people actually doing the work. However, Workplace Democracy is also seen as a Utopian concept at odds with the governing reality of the enterprise, the majority of which exist and thrive as hierarchically-structured corporations not especially aligned to democratically informed governance and decision-making. Also, as a distribution method, the folksonomy may, indeed, facilitate workflow, but it does not guarantee that the information worker will tag and, then, tag consistently, in an unbiased way, and without intentional malice directed at the enterprise. FOLKSONOMY AND TOP-DOWN TAXONOMIES Commentators and information architects have contrasted the hierarchical approach of top-down taxonomies with the folksonomy approach. The former approach is prevalent and represented by many practical examples. One such example is Yahoo! -- one of the earliest general directories for content on the Web. Yahoo! and other similar sites organized and presented links under a fixed hierarchy. This approach imposed one set of tags and one sort order, although Hyperlinking enabled at least a limited ability to traverse distant nodes in the hierarchy based on related subject matter. Clay Shirky is one commentator who has offered explanations for why this approach is limited.Clay Shirky (2005). "Ontology is Overrated" . Compromise with top-down taxonomies It is possible that the differences between taxonomies and folksonomies have been overestimated. Kipp M, Campbell DG (2006). "Patterns and inconsistencies in collaborative tagging systems: an examination of tagging practices" . A possible solution to the shortcomings of folksonomies and Controlled Vocabulary is a collabulary, which can be conceptualized as a compromise between the two: 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. The ability to group tags, e.g. del.icio.us's "bundles" , provides one way for taxonomists to work with an underlying folksonomy. This allows structure to be added without the need for direct collaboration between classification experts and content consumers. Another possible solution is a taxonomy-directed-folksonomy , which relies on the user interfaces to suggest tags from a formal taxonomy, but allows many users to use their own tags. NOTES AND REFERENCES SEE ALSO
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