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» A practice for people to organize and share information in a collaborative and decentralized manner.
Folksonomy
Folksonomy is a system of classification that is created by individual people, rather than by professionals (who sometimes refer themselves as experts) such as archivers or librarians. It is a fashion for people to collaboratively tag and categorize information, often using keywords or labels.
Characteristics
Among the characteristics of folksonomy are: independency, collaborativeness, and being dynamic;
Tags are self-generated by individual people, not by a centralized authority;
Tags can be added by multiple people to the same item, and thereby they create a collective understanding;
Tags can be added, removed, and updated over time, reflecting evolving usage, accuracy and interests;
There is no single source of truth or control over the tagging process.
Benefits
Because people can easily find relevant content by searching for specific tags; and shared tagging promotes collective understanding and knowledge creation; and people feel more involved and empowered by contributing their own insights.
The benefits of folksonomies spans from improved discoverability of contents to enhanced collaboration and increased engagement of people by contributing and benefiting to the overhaul system.
It was written in Adam Mathes' recent paper on folksonomies that:
“There is a fundamental difference in the activities of browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is similar to the difference between exploring a problem space to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for answers to specifically formulated questions. Information seeking behavior varies based on context.”
Conclusion
By practicing and engaging in folksonomy systems, people find many interesting resources that are related to their special and specific needs, that they could not have found using search engines. Blasta has some interesting advantages over search engines, and one of them is being folksonomy driven.
The power of the people cannot be more evident than the awesome resource that is Wikipedia, albeit is has been gradually controlled by special interests. Imagine what might happen if a search engine (e.g. YaCy) can be engineered by people!
Resources
- Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata (adammathes.com)
- Folksonomy : social classification (sylloge.com)
“I think the lack of hierarchy, synonym control and semantic precision are precisely why it works. Free typing loose associations is just a lot easier than making a decision about the degree of match to a pre-defined category (especially hierarchical ones).” ― Stewart Butterfield