No Name No Name's Profile

professional creation

The apparatus and tools built
around professional cataloging systems are generally too
complicated for anyone without specialized training and
knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

but both approaches share a basic problem: the intended and
unintended eventual users of the information are disconnected
from the process.

Recommendation systems, and those that employ
collaborative filtering are another form of leveraging implicit
user created metadata. (Lieberman, 2002

One form of explicit user created metadata was popularized in
the late 1990’s with link-‍focused websites called weblogs (Blood
2000)

“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)

“folksonomy” by
Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information architecture
mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination of “folk” and
“taxonomy.”

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.

Information
seeking behavior varies based on context.

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.

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.

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

Perhaps the most important strength
of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary
of users.

(Buckland, 1999).

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

“Metadata for the Masses,” Peter
Merholz

(Merholz, 2004)

Merholz recommends using a folksonomy as the start of
professionally designed controlled vocabularies

“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

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.

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

“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)

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.

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)

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.

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.