Folksonomy

From LIS 460 Summer 2007

Folksonomy is a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004, to describe individualized, personalized tagging of content by the general public - a “folk”-generated taxonomy for classification of digital objects, (e.g. pictures, books, bookmarks). No authority or standard language, as in traditional classification schemes, is used. Anyone can use any words to describe objects.

In folksonomies, the most commonly used word or words become the accepted language for describing the object. The power of folksonomy comes from many people describing the same, or similar, objects. People with no particular cataloging expertise, or authorized, standardized vocabulary, describe an object with words referred to as tags”. For this reason, folksonomy has been referred to as ‘social classification’.

In the vocabulary of library and information studies, tags are descriptive metadata (data about data). Metadata is a flat structure, not hierarchical, as in traditional library classification schemes such as Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress. In the context of the developing world wide web, it was originally thought that metadata would be defined by either by classification specialists (e.g. catalogers), or authors/creators of digital objects. Tags are, instead, metadata defined by users of digital objects.

Examples of Folksonomies

LibraryThing, Flickr, and Del.icio.us are all well-known examples of the use of folksonomy in categorizing digital objects.

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Folksonomy in School Library

Folksonomy is not a technology per se, but a Web 2.0 feature that some applications have begun to support. Applictions that support tagging can be used by students and faculty to group and manage resources. As tagging becomes more widely available, as applications add it as a feature, it will have greater impact on, and application to, the school environment.

Some examples of ways existing products that support folksonomy can be used in a school library are:

using del.icio.us, students can tag bookmarks for a particular class, or assignment within a class, using teacher-defined tags. This would promote sharing of resources by students, and provide a means for the teacher to see/approve sites that individuals are using. The ability to save a description for a bookmark means that, using tags, an annotated bibliography can be collaboratively created by a class.

LibraryThing could be used by a school library to show newly acquired books, or special resources that they wish to highlight (e.g. books for a teacher-requested topic to support the curriculum, books for a particular library activity, books to celebrate Black History Month or National Poetry Month)

Students could "copy" some library records from a school's LibraryThing catalog into their own LibraryThing catalog, and apply their own tags, as a way of tracking and organizing lists of books they have read, or intend to read, or that they might use for a project.

Even if LibraryThing is not used as the primary catalog, a LibraryThing widget is currently being developed which will allow user-generated tags to be integrated with a non-LibraryThing catalog; this will permit students to describe books in their own words, and permit faculty to earmark books for student use.

Flickr also supports tagging of content by the user community, which can be used by students who are seeking images for a report or project. Many of the people who store photos in Flickr assign a Creative Commons license to their work, which means it may be reused according to the terms of the license they select.

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Questions/Issues

1. Is the lack of a thesaurus a drawback? It seems the power of folksonomy comes from many people participating, and not being limited to a predefined vocabulary. However, in the interest of finding “like” things when searching, it would be useful for synonyms to be recognized.

2. When a user is creating a tag, it might be beneficial to see a list of terms that have already been used to describe similar content, both individually and collectively, by the user community. This implies some level of organization, if not control over human involvement. (see comment #2 on Many2Many’s Folksonomy post.)

3. Users creating tags may be interested only in their personal use of the tags, and not have any interest in social aspects of tagging. It would seem that aggregating tags would make more sense if users could choose to opt in or out of the aggregation. For example, if I am defining tags that I know have interest only to me, or if I am using the tag field provided in a non-standard way (e.g. some personally defined numbering scheme), I would like to hide my tags from others, so they would not be included in the aggregation.

4. Is the name accurate? Thomas Vander Wal was later critical of his coined termed, on the basis of the fact that taxonomies are hierarchical, while metadata is not. Similarly, others have criticized folksonomies as not true classification, but, instead, categorization. Yet others have described it as a method that simply supports user recall on an individual basis.

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