Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags and how often they are applied or searched for, in contrast to a taxonomic classification designed by the owners of the content and specified when it is published. This practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy was originally "the result of personal free tagging of information ..for one's own retrieval", but online sharing and interaction expanded it into collaborative forms. ''Social tagging'' is the application of tags in an open online environment where the tags of other users are available to others. ''Collaborative tagging'' (also known as group tagging) is tagging performed by a group of users. This type of folksonomy is commonly used in cooperative and collaborative projects such as research, content repositories, and social bookmarking. The term was coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004 as a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsfolk'' and ''

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

''. Folksonomies became popular as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation that enable users to collectively classify and find information via shared tags. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy. Folksonomies can be used for

K–12 K–12, from kindergarten to 12th grade, is an American English expression that indicates the range of years of publicly supported primary and secondary education found in the United States, which is similar to publicly supported school grades ...

education, business, and higher education. More specifically, folksonomies may be implemented for social bookmarking, teacher resource repositories, e-learning systems, collaborative learning, collaborative research, professional development and teaching. Wikipedia is also a prime example of folksonomy.

Benefits and disadvantages

Folksonomies are a trade-off between traditional centralized classification and no classification at all, and have several advantages: * Tagging is easy to understand and do, even without training and previous knowledge in classification or indexing * The vocabulary in a folksonomy directly reflects the user's vocabulary * Folksonomies are flexible, in the sense that the user can add or remove tags * Tags consist of both popular content and long-tail content, enabling users to browse and discover new content even in narrow topics * Tags reflect the user's conceptual model without cultural, social, or political bias * Enable the creation of communities, in the sense that users who apply the same tag have a common interest * Folksonomies are multi-dimensional, in the sense that users can assign any number and combination of tags to express a concept There are several disadvantages with the use of tags and folksonomies as well, and some of the advantages (see above) can lead to problems. For example, the simplicity in tagging can result in poorly applied tags. Further, while controlled vocabularies are exclusionary by nature, tags are often ambiguous and overly personalized. Users apply tags to documents in many different ways and tagging systems also often lack mechanisms for handling

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are al ...

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in '' NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, a ...

s and

homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones (equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definition, ...

s, and they also often lack mechanisms for handling

spelling Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes (writing system) to represent a language in its written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme). Spelling is one ...

variations such as misspellings, singular/plural form, conjugated and compound words. Some tagging systems do not support tags consisting of multiple words, resulting in tags like "viewfrommywindow". Sometimes users choose specialized tags or tags without meaning to others.

Elements and types

A folksonomy emerges when users tag content or information, such as web pages, photos, videos, podcasts, tweets, scientific papers and others. Strohmaier et al. elaborate the concept: the term "tagging" refers to a "voluntary activity of users who are annotating resources with term-so-called 'tags' – freely chosen from an unbounded and uncontrolled vocabulary". Others explain tags as an unstructured textual label or keywords, and that they appear as a simple form of metadata. Folksonomies consist of three basic entities: users, tags, and resources. Users create tags to mark resources such as: web pages, photos, videos, and podcasts. These tags are used to manage, categorize and summarize online content. This collaborative tagging system also uses these tags as a way to index information, facilitate searches and navigate resources. Folksonomy also includes a set of URLs that are used to identify resources that have been referred to by users of different websites. These systems also include category schemes that have the ability to organize tags at different levels of granularity. Vander Wal identifies two types of folksonomy: broad and narrow. A broad folksonomy arises when multiple users can apply the same tag to an item, providing information about which tags are the most popular. A narrow folksonomy occurs when users, typically fewer in number and often including the item's creator, tag an item with tags that can each be applied only once. While both broad and narrow folksonomies enable the searchability of content by adding an associated word or phrase to an object, a broad folksonomy allows for sorting based on the popularity of each tag, as well as the tracking of emerging trends in tag usage and developing vocabularies. An example of a broad folksonomy is del.icio.us, a website where users can tag any online resource they find relevant with their own personal tags. The photo-sharing website

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professiona ...

is an oft-cited example of a narrow folksonomy.

Folksonomy vs. taxonomy

'Taxonomy' refers to a hierarchical

categorization Categorization is the ability and activity of recognizing shared features or similarities between the elements of the experience of the world (such as objects, events, or ideas), organizing and classifying experience by associating them to a ...

in which relatively well-defined classes are nested under broader categories. A ''folksonomy'' establishes categories (each tag is a category) without stipulating or necessarily deriving a hierarchical structure of parent-child relations among different tags. (Work has been done on techniques for deriving at least loose hierarchies from clusters of tags.) Supporters of folksonomies claim that they are often preferable to taxonomies because folksonomies democratize the way information is organized, they are more useful to users because they reflect current ways of thinking about domains, and they express more information about domains. Critics claim that folksonomies are messy and thus harder to use, and can reflect transient trends that may misrepresent what is known about a field. An empirical analysis of the complex dynamics of tagging systems, published in 2007, has shown that consensus around stable distributions and shared vocabularies does emerge, even in the absence of a central

controlled vocabulary Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controll ...

. For content to be searchable, it should be categorized and grouped. While this was believed to require commonly agreed on sets of content describing tags (much like keywords of a journal article), some research has found that in large folksonomies common structures also emerge on the level of categorizations. Accordingly, it is possible to devise mathematical models of collaborative tagging that allow for translating from personal tag vocabularies (personomies) to the vocabulary shared by most users. Folksonomy is unrelated to folk taxonomy, a cultural practice that has been widely documented in anthropological and folkloristic 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 The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

). The study of the structuring or classification of folksonomy is termed ''folksontology''. This branch of

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities ...

deals with the intersection between highly structured taxonomies or hierarchies and loosely structured folksonomy, asking what best features can be taken by both for a system of classification. The strength of flat-tagging schemes is their ability to relate one item to others like it. Folksonomy allows large disparate groups of users to collaboratively label massive, dynamic information systems. The strength of taxonomies are their browsability: users can easily start from more generalized knowledge and target their queries towards more specific and detailed knowledge. Folksonomy looks to categorize tags and thus create browsable spaces of information that are easy to maintain and expand.

Social tagging for knowledge acquisition

Social tagging for knowledge acquisition is the specific use of tagging for finding and re-finding specific content for an individual or group. Social tagging systems differ from traditional taxonomies in that they are community-based systems lacking the traditional hierarchy of taxonomies. Rather than a top-down approach, social tagging relies on users to create the folksonomy from the bottom up. Common uses of social tagging for knowledge acquisition include personal development for individual use and collaborative projects. Social tagging is used for knowledge acquisition in secondary, post-secondary, and graduate education as well as personal and business research. The benefits of finding/re-finding source information are applicable to a wide spectrum of users. Tagged resources are located through search queries rather than searching through a more traditional file folder system. The social aspect of tagging also allows users to take advantage of metadata from thousands of other users. Users choose individual tags for stored resources. These tags reflect personal associations, categories, and concepts. All of which are individual representations based on meaning and relevance to that individual. The tags, or keywords, are designated by users. Consequently, tags represent a user's associations corresponding to the resource. Commonly tagged resources include videos, photos, articles, websites, and email. Tags are beneficial for a couple of reasons. First, they help to structure and organize large amounts of digital resources in a manner that makes them easily accessible when users attempt to locate the resource at a later time. The second aspect is social in nature, that is to say that users may search for new resources and content based on the tags of other users. Even the act of browsing through common tags may lead to further resources for knowledge acquisition. Tags that occur more frequently with specific resources are said to be more strongly connected. Furthermore, tags may be connected to each other. This may be seen in the frequency in which they co-occur. The more often they co-occur, the stronger the connection. Tag clouds are often utilized to visualize connectivity between resources and tags. Font size increases as the strength of association increases. Tags show interconnections of concepts that were formerly unknown to a user. Therefore, a user's current cognitive constructs may be modified or augmented by the metadata information found in aggregated social tags. This process promotes knowledge acquisition through cognitive irritation and equilibration. This theoretical framework is known as the co-evolution model of individual and collective knowledge. The co-evolution model focuses on cognitive conflict in which a learner's prior knowledge and the information received from the environment are dissimilar to some degree. When this incongruence occurs, the learner must work through a process cognitive equilibration in order to make personal cognitive constructs and outside information congruent. According to the coevolution model, this may require the learner to modify existing constructs or simply add to them. The additional cognitive effort promotes information processing which in turn allows individual learning to occur.

Examples

* BibSonomy: social bookmarking and publication-sharing system * del.icio.us: public tagging service * Diigo: social bookmarking website *

: shared photos *

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

: online photo-sharing and social networking service * Many libraries' online catalogs * Mendeley: social reference management software *

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboa ...

: photosharing and publishing website *

Steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporizat ...

: video game store * StumbleUpon: content discovery engine *

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

s * The

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working t ...

Annotea In metadata, Annotea is an RDF standard sponsored by the W3C to enhance document-based collaboration via shared document metadata based on tags, bookmarks, and other annotations. In this case document metadata includes: * Keywords * Comments * N ...

project with user-generated tags in 2002. *

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP, hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported secure hypert ...

: blogging tool and Content Management System *

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a ...

References

* * * * *

External links

* * * Folksonomies as a tool for professional scientific databases
"The Three Orders"
2005 explanation of tagging and folksonomies

Vanderwal's take on Wikipedia's definition of folksonomy

Classroom Collaboration Using Social Bookmarking Service Diigo
{{Semantic Web Collective intelligence Knowledge representation Metadata Semantic Web Social bookmarking Taxonomy Web 2.0 neologisms Sociology of knowledge Information architecture Crowdsourcing