Folksonomies

Folksonomies and tagging

Definition

Folksonomies is the new way of organizing human knowledge through the free use of tags by a community of peers.

Discussion

Categorization is both strongly influenced by and a powerful reinforcer of ideology, it follows that revolutions (political or scientific) must change the way things are sorted in order to throw over the old system. (quote from Rob Lightner)

Three Ways to Organize Human Knowlege

There are three broad ways to organize human knowledge:

"Taxonomies are suitable for classifying corpora of homogeneous, stable, restricted entities with a central authority and expert or trained users, but are also expensive to build and maintain. Faceted systems (a sort of polyhierarchy) are useful with a wide range of users with different mental models and vocabularies. They are also more scalable because new items (for users) and new concepts (for cataloguers) can be added with a limited impact and with no need to start a new classification from scratch.

Folksonomies require people to do the work by themselves for personal or social reasons. They are flat and ambiguous and cannot support a targeted search approach. However, they are also inexpensive, scalable and near to the language and mental model of users." (http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm )

Why Classificatin is Different in Digital Environments

David Weinberger explains why classification can be different in digital environments:

"In the physical world, a fruit can hang from only one branch. In the digital world, objects can easily be classified in dozens or even hundreds of different categories; In the real world, multiple people use any one tree. In the digital world, there can be a different tree for each person. In the real world, the person who owns the information generally also owns and controls the tree that organizes that information. In the digital world, users can control the organization of information owned by others." (David Weinberger in Release 1.0.: http://www.release1-0.com/, reproduced in JOHO blogf)

Clay Shirky has also outlined the different conditions where the use of tagging (i.e. folksonomies) may be better than the old models:

The old ‘ontological’ methods of cataloguing work when the domain to be organized is a small corpus with formal categories, consisting of stable and restricted entities with clear edges; the participatns are expert, authorative, coordinated. However, tagging is suited when the domain is characterized by a large corpus without formal categories, with unstanble and unrestricted entities having no clear edtes. Participants are uncoordinated amateurs without authority. (paraphrased from http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html)

Why Tagging is better than Metadata

Clay Shirky also explains why tagging are better than metadata

"This is something the 'well-designed metadata' crowd has never understood -- just because it's better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture." (cited by Cory Doctorow in theBoing Boing blog, January 2005)

“a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization. What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets." (http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html )

Narrow vs. Broad Folksonomies

Thomas Vander Wal explains the difference between broad vs. narrow folksonomies:

"Vander Wal [argues that], there are broad folksonomies and narrow folksonomies, and they are entirely distinct. "Delicious is a broad folksonomy, where a lot of people are describing one object," Vander Wal said. "You might have 200 people giving a set of tags to one object, which really gives a lot of depth.... No matter what you call something, you probably will be able to get back to that object." In a broad folksonomy, Vander Wal continued, there is the benefit of the network effect and the power curve because so many people are involved. An example is the website of contemporary design magazine Moco Loco, to which 166 Delicious users had applied the tag "design." Conversely, Vander Wal explained, Flickr's system is a narrow folksonomy, because rather than many people tagging the same communal items, as with Delicious, small numbers of users tag individual items. Thus many users tag items, but of those, only a small number will tag a particular item. " (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66456,00.html?)

Explaining and showing broad and narrow folksonomies / Thomas Vander Wal -- <http://www.personalinfocloud.com/2005/02/explaining_and_.html> : February 21, 2005

Examples

Some of the sites that pioneered tagging are del.icio.us. <http://del.icio.us/> ; Flickr. <http://www.flickr.com/> ; Furl, <http://www.furl.net/>

More Information

The Wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

A good overview of folksonomies, at http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm

Specialized site on tagging, is at http://www.tagsonomy.com/

Folksonomy / Alex Wright -- <http://www.agwright.com/blog/archives/000900.html> : January 5, 200

Social bookmarking tools / T Hammond, T Hannay, B Lund, J Scott -- <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html/> : April 2005

David Weinberger. "Tagging and why it matters." Retrieved November 10, 2006 from <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/2005-07>

Tagging explained by Business Week at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_15/b3928112_mz063.htm

A philosophical analysis and critique of tagging, linking it to philosophical relativism, see Beneath the Metadata, by Elaine Peterson.

Key Books to Read

A Book on The power of categorization:

Sorting Things Out, by communications theorists Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (The MIT Press, 2000), covers a lot of conceptual ground in this context: " After arguing that categorization is both strongly influenced by and a powerful reinforcer of ideology, it follows that revolutions (political or scientific) must change the way things are sorted in order to throw over the old system. Who knew that such simple, basic elements of thought could have such far-reaching consequences?" (Rob Lightner in a Amazon.com review)