Group items tagged

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

This article is an attempt to clarify the distinct roles for ontologies and folksonomies, and previews some new work that applies the two ideas together - an ontology of folksonomy.

Folksonomies, or user-created taxonomies, are currently used as collaborative tools to describe images, films, hyperlinks, and other objects and documents. LibraryThing is a website that lets users catalog their own book collections through the use of Library of Congress Subject Headings and social tagging. This paper records the results of exploratory research focusing on the connection between folksonomies and controlled vocabulary and utilizing LibraryThing as a possible benchmark to measure tagging’s efficacy and accuracy as an instrument for subject analysis.

The thread that runs through all of this discussion is the most burning question to ask before implementing any folksonomy: What are you willing to do to make it work for your user community? What kind of skills can you and your organization bring to the task? What kinds of hassles and conflicts are you willing to settle? And who in your organization is best suited to oversee such an endeavor? In each of the examples presented here there is a way to contact the ones who run the community, hear complaints, listen to suggestions or provide help to those in need. While there is necessarily a greater (Wikipedia) or lesser (ESPGame) need for supervision, there is nonetheless someone in charge. Who that is for your organization is essential to the success of the community.

Technology is transforming the way in which researchers gain access to archives, not only in the choices archivists make about their uses of technology but in the portable technologies researchers bring with them to the archives. This essay reviews the implications of electronic mail, instant messaging and chat, digital reference services, Web sites, scanners, digital cameras, folksonomies, and various adaptive technologies in facilitating archival access. The new machines represent greater, even unprecedented, opportunities for archivists to support one of the main elements of their professional mission, namely, getting archival records used.

This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.

But increasingly data is being produced without tags, and this lack of tagging makes it difficult or impossible to do intelligent aggregate and selective searches. Folksonomies and taxonomies have become powerful tools in the right hands, but too much data is created without any thoughts or any science about how that data will be maintained or re-purposed in the longer term.

I mean an open source desktop can facilitate metadata tagging from the desktop. Open source tools that interface with databases can pass metadata to and from the database. Editors (even 2d paint, 2d illustration and 3d editors) can become part of the metadata workflow.

Peter Morville explores the future present in mobile devices, search algorithms, ontologies, folksonomies, findable objects, digital librarianship, and the long tail of the sociosemantic web

FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking information architecture resources. It aims to show how the flat keywords space of tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classification scheme to improve the system information architecture.

Looking for tag-related resources can be tough, so we’ve dug up 30 tools and resources that every seasoned tagger should check out.

I have a problem with authority. It's not that I'm independent, insubordinate, and contrarian. I am, but that's not my problem. My problem is with the rising abuse of the word amongst bloggers, wikipedians, folksonomists, and other social software activists.

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the collaborative tagging phenomenon and explore some of the reasons for its emergence. The paper reviews the related literature and discusses some of the problems associated with, and the potential of, collaborative tagging approaches for knowledge organisation and general resource discovery.