Folksonomy
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A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content;[1][2] this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.[citation needed] Folksonomy, a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal, is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy.
Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004[3] as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.[4]
An empirical analysis of the complex dynamics of tagging systems, published in 2007,[5] has shown that consensus around stable distributions and shared vocabularies does emerge, even in the absence of a central controlled vocabulary.
