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.
[1] 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.
[2] Folksonomy (from
folk +
taxonomy) is a
user-generated taxonomy.
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.[1] Aggregation is the pulling together of all of the tags in an automated way.[1] 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.[3]
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.
