Folksonomy: A Way To Organize Information

Metadata is information about information, and is often highly structured and serves a purpose to its user. Descriptive metadata identifies and functions to organize information based on intellectual content. Folksonomies are a form of metadata. Folksonomy describes the practice of categorization using freely chosen words. The term is a modern update of “folk classification,” which describes how average people (non experts) describe the world around them. If you’ve ever used a service such as Flickr or Del.icio.us, you’ve used a folksonomy, which are called “tags” on these services. A folksonomy is a way to organize information, and its uncontrolled nature has many positive and negative aspects.
Inspired by the Age of Internet, keywords have become a fundamental organizational construct. Keywords, which are called “tags” on sites such as Del.icio.us, allow users to organize and describe content with any vocabulary they choose. Using these “tags,” users can not only organize their own data, but also find other data by related tags. There is no hierarchy to these systems, the way the data is listed depends completely on the user. There are inherent problems to this method of organization. One major limitation is ambiguity, due to the fact that there are not a predetermined set of labels and categories. Since users describe their data using their own preferred terms, many different users may use the same tags in different ways. Similarly, users also describe the same content in many different ways. For example, many users create tags like “PC,” “Windows,” and “Microsoft,” but these terms usually describe the same content. Another limitation is that most services only allow tags to be one word, and it’s hard to describe most content in detail with only one word. Some users chose to eliminate spaces so they can use multiple words (ie. museumartwork) but this can often add to confusion.
Even though there are many limitations to folksonomy, there are much more advantages.
A folksonomy directly reflects the language of a user, which allows users to organize their data in a way that is efficient for them. Unlike other information retrieval systems that are designed by professionals, folksonomies allow the individual to label or classify their data. This enables users and not just professionals to participate in the system immediately. I think that the most important strength of a folksonomy is the ability to browse a variety of information. I’ve used tags before to find information that is related to a particular topic, and I find this process very useful.
A folksonomy is an effective way to organize information, and they are becoming more popular, with more services offering users a way to organize their data by keywords. In regards to organizations, folksonomy is helpful for sharing information and researching data. The overall cost for users in terms of time and effort are much less for folksonomies. Unlike complex hierarchal classification systems, a folksonomy is often easier for the user because they don’t have to learn a new system, they can organize things in a way that they can understand.
A folksonomy not only provides an efficient way to organize personal information but also a way to communicate and share information. This ease of use will make them more popular in the future.
For more information on how a folksonomy can benefit organizational systems, check out Alexis' post "Folksonomy Breakdown."
Meghan's post "Putting the Folk back in Folksonomy" offers a very clear explanation of folksonomy. You have to check it out!