Taxonomy
This link has been bookmarked by 672 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Jeff dalton.
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16 Feb 17
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10 Jan 17
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10 Nov 16
OwenJaiiThis page talks about the folksonomy with decent examples.
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A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free- 0dform tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system. Overall, transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free- 0dform tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system. Overall, transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
-
A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free- 0dform tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system. Overall, transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), a photo management and sharing web application, has a similar system of free- 0dform tagging for photos that was adopted and modeled after Delicious. It too requires users to create a user account, and is free to join. There is also the option to pay for an account with more features, like more storage space for photographs. Flickr offers a similar bookmark to add photographs to the system, but also has a number of other options to upload photographs to the system through web pages and software applications. Tags can be added at the time of upload, or later in the process when the photographs are displayed by the system.
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Flickr is primarily used by individuals to manage their own digital images, and the majority of the tags are users tagging photos they created themselves
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An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent- 0dchild or sibling relationships between these terms. There are, however, automatically generated “related” tags, which cluster tags based on common URLs. This is unlike formal taxonomies and classification schemes where there are multiple kind of explicit relationships between terms. These relationships include things like broader, narrower, as well as related terms. These folksonomies are simply the set of terms that a group of users tagged content with, they are not a predetermined set of classification terms or labels.
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Some terms that have particular meaning in the photographic domain like portrait, macro, landscape, blackandwhite were included. The terms “cameraphone, moblog, fotolog” reflect the use of relatively new words, and the connection the site has to tech savvy early adopters of integrated camera phone technology and weblogs focused on photographs.
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The problems inherent in an uncontrolled vocabulary lead to a number of limitations and weaknesses in folksonomies. Ambiguity of the tags can emerge as users apply the same tag in different ways. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the lack of synonym control can lead to different tags being used for the same concept, precluding collocation.
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Although a folksonomy is not a controlled vocabulary, and certainly does have limitations, there are important strengths that are important to understanding the appeal and utility of such systems.
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It is difficult to define a metric by which one could argue folksonomies are a success or failure, but the degree that it does seem to be effective in these systems as a way or organizing information, and that a large group of people are using these systems, I posit, is due to a few important factors. The overall costs for users of the system in terms of time and effort are far lower than systems that rely on complex hierarchal classification and categorization schemes. In addition to this structural difference, the context of the use in these systems is not just one of personal organization, but of communication and sharing. The near instant feedback in these systems leads to a communicative nature of tag use.
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A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free- 0dform tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system. Overall, transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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29 Jun 16
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A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors. The movement towards creator described documents was heralded by SGML, the WWW, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are problems with this approach as well - often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception.
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This paper examines a third approach: user-created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.
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Browsing vs. Finding
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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.
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03 Nov 15
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Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us, henceforth referred to as “Delicious”) is a tool to organize web pages.
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Flickr (http://www.flickr.com),
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The organic system of organization developing in Delicious and Flickr was called a “folksonomy” by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information architecture mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination of “folk” and “taxonomy.”
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An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms. There are, however, automatically generated “related” tags, which cluster tags based on common URLs.
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Limitations
The problems inherent in an uncontrolled vocabulary lead to a number of limitations and weaknesses in folksonomies. Ambiguity of the tags can emerge as users apply the same tag in different ways. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the lack of synonym control can lead to different tags being used for the same concept, precluding collocation.
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Strengths
Although a folksonomy is not a controlled vocabulary, and certainly does have limitations, there are important strengths that are important to understanding the appeal and utility of such systems.
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03 Sep 15
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30 Aug 15
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31 Jul 15
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user-generated metadata
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Metadata - data about data - allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information.
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The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation
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The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web.
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user-created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.
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Metadata is information, often highly structured, about documents, books, articles, photographs, or other items that is designed to support specific functions. These functions are usually to facilitate some organization and access of information.
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While professionally created metadata are often considered of high quality, it is costly in terms of time and effort to produce
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An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms. There are, however, automatically generated “related” tags, which cluster tags based on common URLs. This is unlike formal taxonomies and classification schemes where there are multiple kind of explicit relationships between terms. These relationships include things like broader, narrower, as well as related terms. These folksonomies are simply the set of terms that a group of users tagged content with, they are not a predetermined set of classification terms or labels.
-
The overall costs for users of the system in terms of time and effort are far lower than systems that rely on complex hierarchal classification and categorization schemes. In addition to this structural difference, the context of the use in these systems is not just one of personal organization, but of communication and sharing.
-
A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free-form tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system. Overall, transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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11 Jun 15
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25 Mar 15
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18 Jan 15
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06 Jun 14
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21 May 14
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15 Mar 14
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27 Jan 14
Maha Abed"This paper examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. "
folksonomy tagging metadata classification folksonomies tags web2.0 flickr
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03 Jul 13
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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.
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While one could evaluate a folksonomy in a system like Delicious or Flickr by using specific queries from users, and then evaluating which documents tagged with keywords they choose are relevant to the query, that would ignore the broader set of browsing activities that the system seems to be stronger in. Measuring the utility of that aspect would likely require qualitative research in the form of interviews or ethnographic study of users, and is an area of further study. It would also require comparisons not to search based information retrieval systems, but to browsing activities using other categorization and classification schemes.
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translating between these vocabularies is often a difficult and defining issue in information systems.
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folksonomy can be quite useful in that it reveals the digital equivalent of “desire lines” (Merholz, 2004).
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pave the emerging walkways, ensuring optimal utility
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Ethnoclassification systems can similarly ‘emerge.’
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using a folksonomy as the start of professionally designed controlled vocabularies
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The overall costs for users of the system in terms of time and effort are far lower than systems that rely on complex hierarchal classification and categorization schemes.
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In addition to this structural difference, the context of the use in these systems is not just one of personal organization, but of communication and sharing. The near instant feedback in these systems leads to a communicative nature of tag use.
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enables users — not just professionals — without any training or previous knowledge to participate in the system immediately
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easier in terms of time, effort and cognitive costs.
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Feedback is immediate. As soon as you assign a tag to an item, you see the cluster of items carrying the same tag. If that’s not what you expected, you’re given incentive to change the tag or add another. If your items aren’t confidential and online-only access is sufficient, this can be a great way to manage personal information. But the real power emerges when you expand the scope to include all items, from all users, that match your tag. Again, that view might not be what you expected. In that case, you can adapt to the group norm, keep your tag in a bid to influence the group norm, or both.” (Udell, 2004)
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The users of a system are negotiating the meaning of the terms in the folksonomy, whether purposefully or not, through their individual choices of tags to describe documents for themselves.
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Individuals have an incentive to tag their materials with terms that will help them organize their collections in a way that they can find these items later.
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The organizational scheme that emerges for each individual reflects their individual information needs.
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there is definitely evidence of communication and perhaps even community formation through metadata
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A folksonomy lowers the barriers to cooperation. Groups of users do not have to agree on a hierarchy of tags or detailed taxonomy, they only need to agree, in a general sense, on the “meaning” of a tag enough to label similar material with terms for there to be cooperation and shared value. Although this may require a change in vocabulary for some users,
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it is never forced, and as Udell discussed, the tight feedback loop provides incentives for this cooperation.
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The very act of user self-selecting what to tag is important: this is not just material that users want to find themselves later, but also material they are sharing with others.
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an explicit kind of social networking component built-in
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it follows a power law scenario. That is, the most used tags are more likely to be used by other users since they are more likely to be seen, and thus there will be a few tags that are used by a substantial number of users, then an order of magnitude more tags that are used by fewer users, and another order of magnitude more used by only a handful of users
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distribution of tag use
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Examining this sort of distribution of tag use could give a better indication of whether a folksonomy converges on terms and foster consensus, or if as the user based grows the vocabulary grows at a more even rate, and the distribution of terms flattens, perhaps indicating less agreement.
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Examining user behavior through ethnographic observation or interview to understand user motivations and cognitive processes in tagging items would clarify what factors directly influence the formation of a folksonomy, and how individual incentives and group communication motivations influence use of the system.
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lucidate the conscious intentions of users in “normal” use of the system
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frequency with which users modify or change their tags
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If information retrieval systems begin to incorporate user-centered information management tools, the organizational schemes developed by the users have the possibility to be of great interest to other users and improve the systems.
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encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies,
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transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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nvolve the users of information actively in the organizational system.
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16 Jun 13
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to share and organize digital media
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creation
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rofessional creation
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author creation
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professional
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two ways
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two ways
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creation
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has tr
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professionals
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A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors
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A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors
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a third approach: user-created metadata
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This paper examines a third approach: user-created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.
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Metadata is often characterized as “data about data.” Metadata is information, often highly structured, about documents, books, articles, photographs, or other items that is designed to support specific functions. These functions are usually to facilitate some organization and access of information. Administrative, structural, and descriptive metadata are three broad categories of metadata (Taylor, 2004). This paper focus primarily on descriptive metadata which identifies and functions to organize information based on its intellectual content.
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Metadata is information,
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to facilitate some organization and access of information.
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information
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dministrative, structural, and descriptive metadata
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information
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dedicated professionals.
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Traditionally
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t is costly in terms of time and effort to produce.
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An alternative is author created metadata.
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the intended and unintended eventual users of the information are disconnected from the process.
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metadata is a third approac
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User created metadata is a third approach
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are often implicit.
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link structure
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One form of explicit user created metadata
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link-focused websites called weblogs
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links combined with commentary,
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unstructured, but explicit
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to organize web
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add sites you like
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manager
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categorize those sites with keywords,
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share
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Delicious is not unique
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keywords
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keywords
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o as “tags” on the site
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specialized bookmark
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select the bookmark
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enter any tags
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without taggin
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collocate
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collocate
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“linux” by any user.
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Flick
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free-form tagging
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ther part
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from the users
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their own digital images
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created themselves.
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as friends or family to tag a users’ photos.
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The most popular tags used on Delicious are listed on the right side of the front page
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“folksonomy
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flat namespace
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o hierarchy
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is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms
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between these term
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“related” tags,
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things like broader, narrower, as well as related terms.
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Some of the most popular tags
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common interests
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self-organization and reminder
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interested in.
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The 150 most popular tags on Flickr are tabulated and listed on the site
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2004, this list included much of what one might expect as common subjects of photos: cat, friends, dog sky, sea, park, kids, garden, baby, building, flower, flowers signs, sculpture, city,
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e cities
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new words,
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“categorization.
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can have many terms associated with it.
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single classification to an item
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lat namespace
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As an uncontrolled vocabulary that is shared across an entire system, the terms in a folksonomy have inhere
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different users apply terms to documents in different ways
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guidelines
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d no scope notes. For example, items tagged with “filtering” on Delicious included the following:
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example
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here are no explicit systemati
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- Last.FM - Your personal music network - Personalized online radio station
- InfoWorld: Collaborative knowledge gardening
- Wired 12.10: The Lon
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- ail
- Oh My God It Burns! “ Practical Applications of the Philosopher’s stone. For drunks. Brita filter makes bad vodka into good vodka
- Introduction to Bayesian Filtering
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sing water filters to purify vodka is a very different subject than Bayesian statistical analysis.
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different senses
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Acronyms
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her area of potential ambiguity that are often dealt with effectively in controlled vocabularies. Examining the front page on November 14, 2004 revealed one user tagging sites with “ANT.” After examining the other sites the user tagged with ANT, it was apparent this was an acronym for “Actor Network Theory,” in the domain of sociology. However, when examining the ANT tag across all users (Delicious apparently is not case sensitive in tags) most of the bookmarks were about Apache Ant, a project buil
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ideas are mixed together in the same tag
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single words
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spaces in tag names
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vertigovideostillsbbc
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letter case
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acronyms
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no synonym contro
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Different word forms, plural and singular
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Plural vs. singula
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controlled vocabularies
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controlled vocabularies
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controlled vocabulary would be impossible
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folksonomy
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is not a controlled vocabulary
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serendipity
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of browsing to find interesting
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to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query.
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reflects the vocabulary of users
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user of
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designer
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author
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creators
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e user
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e users
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their choices in diction, terminology, and precision.
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“desire lines
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“A smart landscape designer will let wanderers create paths through use, and then pave the emerging walkways, ensuring optimal utility.
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emerge.
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ks the users’ language.
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as the start of professionally de
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both “ethnoclassification” and “folksonomy,” as well as various other tags including “userexperience,” “tagging,” “taxonomy,” “metadata,” “socialsoftware,” and “facets.”
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that individual users
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adapt
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uncontrolled nature and organic growth
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that a large group of people are using these systems
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lower
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of communication and sharing
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to an ad-hoc set of keywords enables users
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far easier
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ynonym control
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antic precisio
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lack of hierarchy
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why it works.
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10 times simpler.” (Butterfield, 2004)
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difference in kind
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cluster of items
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carrying the same tag
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manage personal information
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include all items, from all users, that match your tag
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can adapt t
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to influence the group norm, or both
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asymmetrical communication between users through metadata.
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one that focuses on individual incentives, and one that focuses on community aspects.
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used by individuals to organize materials with their own vocabulary of terms.
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can find these items later
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me” tag
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services designed to share materials
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public virtual space
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influenced and related
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ommunity formation through metadata,
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Groups of users do not have to agree
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ompulsion to share
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what to tag is important
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to specify other users
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subscribe” to other users lists.
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not mutually exclusive
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a use of tags as communicative tool
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quick formation of new terms to describe what is going on, and others adopting that term and the activity it describes
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quantitative
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distribution of tag use:
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few tags that are used by a substantial number of users
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Qualit
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ethnographic
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facilitate communication through tag use,
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users modify or change their tags,
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frequency
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bears further investigation
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folksonomy to supplement existing classification
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user-centered information
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interest to other users and improve the systems.
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folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information
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ambiguity
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imprecision
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o organize information in their own ways
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involve the users of information actively in the organizationa
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into a shared, communicative activity by users
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development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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22 Apr 13
Joanne SMathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata.
web101 folksonomy tagging metadata classification folksonomies
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he overall costs for users of the system in terms of time and effort are far lower than systems that rely on complex hierarchal classification and categorization schemes. In addition to this structural difference, the context of the use in these systems is not just one of personal organization, but of communication and sharing. The near instant feedback in these systems leads to a communicative nature of tag use.
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15 Jan 13
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Traditionally metadata is created by dedicated professionals. Catalogers create metadata, often in the form of Machine- 0dReadable Cataloging (MARC) records for books and other intellectual creations, and this is the basis of most Online Public Access Catalogs (OPAC) in libraries and other institutions. This often requires serious education and training. The library and information science field has developed elaborate rules and schemes for cataloging, categorization and classification that include classification schemes such as the Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress Classification Scheme, as well as large controlled vocabularies of terms for describing the subject of materials, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
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07 Jan 13
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14 Dec 12
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12 Dec 12
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Metadata is often characterized as “data about data.” Metadata is information, often highly structured, about documents, books, articles, photographs, or other items that is designed to support specific functions. These functions are usually to facilitate some organization and access of information. Administrative, structural, and descriptive metadata are three broad categories of metadata (Taylor, 2004).
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27 Nov 12
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15 Nov 12
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user- 0dgenerated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification
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grassroots
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user- 0dgenerated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand
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classification
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grassroots
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Metadata - data about data - allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information.
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The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation
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07 Nov 12
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01 Nov 12
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30 Oct 12
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primarily subject descriptor keywords at various levels of specificity
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are best described as genre or form descriptors
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used for self-organization and reminder
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29 Aug 12
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27 Aug 12
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14 May 12
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29 Apr 12
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Some of the most popular tags (as of November 14, 2004) according to the system were: “software, design, programming, music, politics, web, news, blog, css, linux, art, osx, java, mac, blogs, reference, fun, python, games, tech, photography, humor, tools, delicious, rss, firefox, toread, comics.” Many of these are technical subject tags reflecting the common interests of a tech-savvy user base, e.g. “rss, firefox, python, java, linux.” Some are best described as genre or form descriptors, like “comics, humor, fun, photography.” At least one, “toread,” is something qualitatively different: it is a tag apparently used for self-organization and reminder. Similarly, “wishlist” (http://del.icio.us/tag/wishlist) was apparently used by a number of users to highlight consumer items they were interested in.
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Overall, although the term “classification” is often used in relation to these systems, and has been used in this paper, what is going on is more like “categorization.” Categorization is generally less rigorous and boundaries are less clear. It is based more on a synthesis of similarity than a systematic arrangement of materials (Jacob 2004). Most importantly, each document can have many terms associated with it. By contrast, classification schemes generally focus on providing a single classification to an item, and are very hierarchical and have clear relations. In a folksonomy the set of terms is a flat namespace: there are no clearly defined relations between the terms in the vocabulary.
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Ambiguity
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Spaces, Multiple Word
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Synonyms
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Strengths
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Browsing vs. Finding
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Desire Lines
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Why Folksonomies Work
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A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free-form tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system. Overall, transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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09 Mar 12
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07 Mar 12
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04 Mar 12
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21 Jan 12
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21 Nov 11
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The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web
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Traditionally metadata is created by dedicated professionals.
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This makes it very difficult to scale and keep up with the vast amounts of new content being produced, especially in new mediums like the World Wide Web
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“software, design, programming, music, politics, web, news, blog, css, linux, art, osx, java, mac, blogs, reference, fun, python, games, tech, photography, humor, tools, delicious, rss, firefox, toread, comics.”
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Perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users.
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As discussed earlier, a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents.
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the term is inaccurate due to its derivation from “taxonomy,” which he argues tend towards hierarchy and control
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. The overall costs for users of the system in terms of time and effort are far lower than systems that rely on complex hierarchal classification and categorization schemes.
-
Individuals have an incentive to tag their materials with terms that will help them organize their collections in a way that they can find these items later.
-
That is, the most used tags are more likely to be used by other users since they are more likely to be seen, and thus there will be a few tags that are used by a substantial number of users, then an order of magnitude more tags that are used by fewer users, and another order of magnitude more used by only a handful of users.
-
Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate.
-
supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system
-
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10 Nov 11
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grassroots classification
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Some classification schemes are disjoint from the vocabulary of the users. In “Metadata for the Masses,” Peter Merholz argues that a folksonomy can be quite useful in that it reveals the digital equivalent of “desire lines” (Merholz, 2004). Desire lines are the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time. Merholz notes, “A smart landscape designer will let wanderers create paths through use, and then pave the emerging walkways, ensuring optimal utility. Ethnoclassification systems can similarly ‘emerge.’ Once you have a preliminary system in place, you can use the most common tags to develop a controlled vocabulary that truly speaks the users’ language.”
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“pave the paths”
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noisy metadata
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ncentive to tag their materials with terms that will help them organize their collections in a way that they can find these items later
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The organizational scheme that emerges for each individual reflects their individual information needs.
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“me” tag on Flickr
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Delicious
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“toread”
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individual user
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ethnographic observation or interview to understand user motivations and cognitive processes in tagging items would clarify what factors directly influence the formation of a folksonomy
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modify or change their tag
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olksonomy to supplement existing classification schemes and provide additional access to materials by encouraging and leveraging explicit user metadata contributions is a possible area for research and further development in information retrieval systems.
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best and worst
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chaotic
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imprecision and ambiguity
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supremely responsive to user needs
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vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system
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explored and considered for future systems development.
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29 Oct 11
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12 Oct 11
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28 Sep 11
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10 Aug 11
Joanne du HommetAdam Mathes Computer Mediated Communication - LIS590CMCGraduate School of Library and Information ScienceUniversity of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignDecember 2004
folksonomy tagging classification seb sémantique adam mathes
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02 Aug 11
Serge CorbeilSection 2.3 du cours
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Administrative, structural, and descriptive metadata are three broad categories of metadata (Taylor, 2004).
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While professionally created metadata are often considered of high quality, it is costly in terms of time and effort to produce. This makes it very difficult to scale and keep up with the vast amounts of new content being produced, especially in new mediums like the World Wide Web. An alternative is author created metadata
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These keywords, which are referred to as “tags” on the site, allow users to describe and organize content with any vocabulary they choose
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A primary difference between Delicious and Flickr is that while the tags on Delicious are primarily from the users of web documents that were written by another party, Flickr is primarily used by individuals to manage their own digital images, and the majority of the tags are users tagging photos they created themselves. This is not absolute; the system does have the option of allowing users designated as friends or family to tag a users’ photos. Additionally, users can and do enter images others created into the system, often from web sites. This use of the system is much more like Delicious, but seems to be a small fraction of the use.
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In a folksonomy the set of terms is a flat namespace: there are no clearly defined relations between the terms in the vocabulary.
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Both Delicious and Flickr seem designed primarily to deal with single words. Delicious does not allow spaces in tag names, although Flickr does. In some instances, multiple words are used together in a single tag, without spaces, i.e., ‘vertigovideostillsbbc’ on Flickr.
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There is no synonym control in the system. This leads to tags that seemingly have similar intended meanings, like “mac,” “macintosh,” and “apple” all being used to describe materials related to Apple Macintosh computers. Different word forms, plural and singular, are also often both present. In this particular situation with these Macintosh tags, the “related tags” sidebar of Delicious interlinks all three of these categories automatically. Plural vs. singular is often a problem, as seen in the popular tags on Flickr, both “flower” and “flowers” were listed.
These sorts of problems are the reasons why controlled vocabularies are used in many settings. Generally, any of the classic problems that controlled vocabularies help deal with will be present in these systems to varying degrees. However, it is likely that a controlled vocabulary would be impossible in the context of systems like Delicious and Flickr.
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Although a folksonomy is not a controlled vocabulary, and certainly does have limitations, there are important strengths that are important to understanding the appeal and utility of such systems.
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Perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users. In an information retrieval system, there are at least two, and possibly many more vocabularies present (Buckland, 1999)
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As discussed earlier, a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents. In this way, it directly reflects their choices in diction, terminology, and precision.
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Although the Delicious tags on Merholz’s article are only one example, a folksonomy, with its uncontrolled nature and organic growth, has the capability to adapt very quickly to user vocabulary changes and needs. There is no significant cost for a user or for the system to add new terms to the folksonomy. The problem is that while the disparate user vocabularies and terms enable some very interesting browsing and finding, the sheer multiplicity of terms and vocabularies may overwhelm the content with noisy metadata that is not useful or relevant to a user.
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Both Delicious and Flickr are used by individuals to organize materials with their own vocabulary of terms. Individuals have an incentive to tag their materials with terms that will help them organize their collections in a way that they can find these items later. The organizational scheme that emerges for each individual reflects their individual information needs. The popularity of the “me” tag on Flickr perhaps best reflects this aspect of a folksonomy, as well as the “toread” tag on Delicious. Both can really only be understood in the context of an individual user.
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16 Jun 11
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26 May 11
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Metadata is often characterized as “data about data.
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“a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others” (Schachter, 2004)
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The organic system of organization developing in Delicious and Flickr was called a “folksonomy” by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information architecture mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination of “folk” and “taxonomy.”
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An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms.
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Feedback is immediate. As soon as you assign a tag to an item, you see the cluster of items carrying the same tag.
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In that case, you can adapt to the group norm, keep your tag in a bid to influence the group norm, or both.” (Udell, 2004)
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ndividuals have an incentive to tag their materials with terms that will help them organize their collections in a way that they can find these items later.
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The individual organizational behavior takes place in a public virtual space on these web sites. Therefore the behavior of the users can also be thought of as being influenced and related to their relationship to the other individuals using the service, and specific groups of users who they share tag use with.
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A folksonomy lowers the barriers to cooperation. Groups of users do not have to agree on a hierarchy of tags or detailed taxonomy, they only need to agree, in a general sense, on the “meaning” of a tag enough to label similar material with terms for there to be cooperation and shared value
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Finally, there is the compulsion to share in general that underlies these systems. The very act of user self-selecting what to tag is important: this is not just material that users want to find themselves later, but also material they are sharing with others.
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14 May 11
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Two tags of particular interest are “cute,” and “me.” This will be elaborated upon later, but I think these two terms reflect the dual nature of these systems: the compulsion to share - what is the Internet if not a venue for sharing cute photographs? - and conversely the importance of individuality and ego for these systems to work.
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If that’s not what you expected, you’re given incentive to change the tag or add another. If
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26 May 10
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21 May 10
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professional creation and author creation
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metadata to be created by authors
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Metadata is often characterized as “data about data.
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Add Sticky NoteThis often requires serious education and training. The library and information science field has developed elaborate rules and schemes for cataloging, categorization and classification that include classification schemes such as the Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress Classification Scheme, as well as large controlled vocabularies of terms for describing the subject of materials, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
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14 May 10
Adolfo Muñoz AguilarUn enfoque formal entorno a los TAGs y la FLOKSONMIA en lo que parece un artículo académico, quizás una fuente citable.
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27 Apr 10
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12 Apr 10
John PearceThough it dates from 2004 and things are ever changing in this area, this paper from Adam Mathes is a great read for those wishing to track the progress of the development of the folksonomy movement. The article also includes an examination of the plusses and minusses associated with folksonomies.
folksonomy tagging metadata folksonomies classification tags web2.0 flickr eet330 edtechcrew
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30 Mar 10
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06 Mar 10
Nik BowerFolksonomy a description
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An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms. There are, however, automatically generated “related” tags, which cluster tags based on common URLs. This is unlike formal taxonomies and classification schemes where there are multiple kind of explicit relationships between terms. These relationships include things like broader, narrower, as well as related terms. These folksonomies are simply the set of terms that a group of users tagged content with, they are not a predetermined set of classification terms or labels.
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01 Mar 10
Julie PlattA scholarly paper about folksonomies and tagging
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27 Feb 10
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24 Feb 10
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23 Feb 10
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While professionally created metadata are often considered of high quality, it is costly in terms of time and effort to produce. This makes it very difficult to scale and keep up with the vast amounts of new content being produced, especially in new mediums like the World Wide Web. An alternative is author created metadata. Original creators of the intellectual material provide metadata along with their creations. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has been used with some success in this area (Greenberg et al, 2002). Author created metadata may help with the scalability problems in comparison to professional metadata, but both approaches share a basic problem: the intended and unintended eventual users of the information are disconnected from the process.
User created metadata is a third approach, and this paper focuses on grassroots community classification of digital assets. Other forms of user created metadata are often implicit. Citation analysis is a well established technique used to determine relationships between academic works and the impact of scholars. Similar analysis of the link structure in the World Wide Web is used by the PageRank algorithm, which became the theoretical basis for the Google search engine (Page, 1998). Recommendation systems, and those that employ collaborative filtering are another form of leveraging implicit user created metadata. (Lieberman, 2002).
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In Delicious, a cursory analysis of the tags reveals that the most popular tags are primarily subject descriptor keywords at various levels of specificity. Some of the most popular tags (as of November 14, 2004) according to the system were: “software, design, programming, music, politics, web, news, blog, css, linux, art, osx, java, mac, blogs, reference, fun, python, games, tech, photography, humor, tools, delicious, rss, firefox, toread, comics.”
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Two tags of particular interest are “cute,” and “me.” This will be elaborated upon later, but I think these two terms reflect the dual nature of these systems: the compulsion to share - what is the Internet if not a venue for sharing cute photographs? - and conversely the importance of individuality and ego for these systems to work.
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Overall, although the term “classification” is often used in relation to these systems, and has been used in this paper, what is going on is more like “categorization.” Categorization is generally less rigorous and boundaries are less clear. It is based more on a synthesis of similarity than a systematic arrangement of materials (Jacob 2004). Most importantly, each document can have many terms associated with it. By contrast, classification schemes generally focus on providing a single classification to an item, and are very hierarchical and have clear relations. In a folksonomy the set of terms is a flat namespace: there are no clearly defined relations between the terms in the vocabulary.
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Acronyms present another area of potential ambiguity that are often dealt with effectively in controlled vocabularies. Examining the front page on November 14, 2004 revealed one user tagging sites with “ANT.” After examining the other sites the user tagged with ANT, it was apparent this was an acronym for “Actor Network Theory,” in the domain of sociology. However, when examining the ANT tag across all users (Delicious apparently is not case sensitive in tags) most of the bookmarks were about Apache Ant, a project building tool in the Java programming language. Two completely separate domains and ideas are mixed together in the same tag.
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21 Feb 10
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07 Feb 10
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03 Feb 10
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30 Jan 10
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This paper examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification.
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metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation
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creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies
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A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors.
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There are problems with this approach as well
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This paper examines a third approach: user-created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.
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24 Jan 10
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04 Dec 09
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Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free-form tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system.
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24 Nov 09
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21 Nov 09
Sarah TarpleyDescribes the use of tags and the development of folksonomies in various social sites.
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04 Nov 09
No Name No NameAnnotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adammathes.com%2Facademic%2Fcomputer-mediated-communication%2Ffolksonomies.html
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Metadata - data about data - allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information.
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author creation
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professional creation
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The apparatus and tools built around professional cataloging systems are generally too complicated for anyone without specialized training and knowledge.
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a third approach: user-created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.
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Metadata is often characterized as “data about data.” Metadata is information, often highly structured, about documents, books, articles, photographs, or other items that is designed to support specific functions.
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While professionally created metadata are often considered of high quality, it is costly in terms of time and effort to produce. This makes it very difficult to scale and keep up with the vast amounts of new content being produced, especially in new mediums like the World Wide Web.
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but both approaches share a basic problem: the intended and unintended eventual users of the information are disconnected from the process.
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Recommendation systems, and those that employ collaborative filtering are another form of leveraging implicit user created metadata. (Lieberman, 2002
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One form of explicit user created metadata was popularized in the late 1990’s with link-focused websites called weblogs (Blood 2000)
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“a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others” (Schachter, 2004)
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“folksonomy” by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information architecture mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination of “folk” and “taxonomy.”
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Overall, although the term “classification” is often used in relation to these systems, and has been used in this paper, what is going on is more like “categorization.” Categorization is generally less rigorous and boundaries are less clear.
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Information seeking behavior varies based on context.
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There is no synonym control in the system. This leads to tags that seemingly have similar intended meanings, like “mac,” “macintosh,” and “apple” all being used to describe materials related to Apple Macintosh computers.
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The first is serendipity. While the controlled vocabulary issues discussed above may hamper findability, browsing the system and its interlinked related tag sets is wonderful for finding things unexpectedly in a general area.
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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
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Perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users.
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(Buckland, 1999).
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a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents
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“Metadata for the Masses,” Peter Merholz
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(Merholz, 2004)
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Merholz recommends using a folksonomy as the start of professionally designed controlled vocabularies
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“ethnoclassification,” which is what he uses in his article, and there is no mention of “folksonomy” to be found. Ethnoclassification is also inaccurate, because as discussed, what is happening is quite unlike classification and far more like categorization
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The problem is that while the disparate user vocabularies and terms enable some very interesting browsing and finding, the sheer multiplicity of terms and vocabularies may overwhelm the content with noisy metadata that is not useful or relevant to a user.
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The overall costs for users of the system in terms of time and effort are far lower than systems that rely on complex hierarchal classification and categorization schemes
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“Aside: 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). It’s like 90% of the value of a ‘proper’ taxonomy but 10 times simpler.” (Butterfield, 2004)
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Jon Udell (2004) argues that the idea of abandoning taxonomy in favor of lists of keywords is not new, and that the fundamental difference in these systems is feedback.
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But the real power emerges when you expand the scope to include all items, from all users, that match your tag. Again, that view might not be what you expected. In that case, you can adapt to the group norm, keep your tag in a bid to influence the group norm, or both.” (Udell, 2004)
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A folksonomy lowers the barriers to cooperation. Groups of users do not have to agree on a hierarchy of tags or detailed taxonomy, they only need to agree, in a general sense, on the “meaning” of a tag enough to label similar material with terms for there to be cooperation and shared value.
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A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Conversely, systems employing free-form tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system. Overall, transforming the creation of explicit metadata for resources from an isolated, professional activity into a shared, communicative activity by users is an important development that should be explored and considered for future systems development.
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27 Oct 09
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20 Oct 09
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Yuichi Tanaka"In addition to this structural difference, the context of the use in these systems is not just one of personal organization, but of communication and sharing. The near instant feedback in these systems leads to a communicative nature of tag use."
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16 Oct 09
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09 Oct 09
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08 Oct 09
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Add Sticky NoteMerholz does not use the term “folksonomy.” He has written on his personal web site that the term is inaccurate due to its derivation from “taxonomy,” which he argues tend towards hierarchy and control. (Merholz, 2004) (See also Taylor, 2004, for discussions of problems and disputes with the term “taxonomy.”) Merholz prefers the term “ethnoclassification,” which is what he uses in his article, and there is no mention of “folksonomy” to be found. Ethnoclassification is also inaccurate, because as discussed, what is happening is quite unlike classification and far more like categorization.
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Classification uses a scheme, where as categorization is more ad hoc.
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06 Oct 09
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28 Sep 09
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The organic system of organization developing in Delicious and Flickr was called a “folksonomy” by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information architecture mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination of “folk” and “taxonomy.”
An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms. There are, however, automatically generated “related” tags, which cluster tags based on common URLs. This is unlike formal taxonomies and classification schemes where there are multiple kind of explicit relationships between terms. These relationships include things like broader, narrower, as well as related terms. These folksonomies are simply the set of terms that a group of users tagged content with, they are not a predetermined set of classification terms or labels.
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Public Stiky Notes
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