Introduction
The evolution of Web 2.0 has seen many novel approaches to technology and management of information. One of the notable changes to arise from this is the advent of folksonomies. This paper will examine the invention, purpose, and uses of this new organisational system. Pros and cons of the system will be analysed and weighed against each other in order to determine the true value of folksonomies and the effects which they have had on the Web 2.0 as a whole as well as users’ experiences of the web. We will consider the question of whether folksonomies are a better option than the more traditional, authoritative organisation systems and how exactly they differ from these systems.
What is a Folksonomy and what is it for?
Park informs us that the term folksonomy is used to refer to a “practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords by a group of people cooperating spontaneously” (Quintarelli 2005 cited in Park 2011, p. 515). Folksonomies put users in charge of organising information – they become an active part of the process of naming and labelling information. The advent of folksonomies affected a shift in the way information is managed and organised. Where once there was only one set, specific way to order or classify information, this is now done in a more democratic manner. As Mai observes, “Professionals have historically created order in the universe of knowledge based on analysis and understanding of objects in the universe of knowledge and their use. Folksonomies, on the other hand, emerge without the involvement of professionals’ interpretation and the users of the systems and the objects create order collaboratively” (2011, p. 115). Mai (2011) stipulates that there is not one right way to categorise information, but many and that folksonomies emerged as a result of thinking such as this. He points out that, “The argument is, therefore, that individual people engaged with the knowledge are in the best position to order it” (Mai 2011, p. 115).
Mai cites Olson (2002), who said that naming a thing “is a means of structuring reality. It imposes a pattern on the world that is meaningful to the namer” (Olson 2002 cited in Mai 2011, p. 115). Naming is a way of creating a structured order. The names given to objects reflect where they belong in the grand scheme of things. If limitations are imposed, the variety of words that can be used to describe an object is far less than if there are no limitations. Giving the power of naming to users – as is the idea of folksonomies – grants users a great amount of freedom in this way. Of course, this is not to say that people name things in completely irrelevant ways; on the contrary, people are fairly accurate with naming objects and employ various ways of doing so. Furthermore, “context, purpose, and time do shape what is being said about something” (Mai 2011, p. 115). People name objects according to their context and their needs at the time.
Folksonomies were created when users of the web saw a need for labelling information objects. Tags – user-created phrases used as labels and classifications – were employed, giving people the ability to organise information in ways that are meaningful to them. Naming, then, becomes a “personal thing” and limitations are reduced as people see things in various ways dependent upon their own viewpoint (Mai 2011, p. 115). In classification systems that rely on professionals to assign names and terms, “a professional makes a decision regarding the assignment of a term or the creation of a class in an authoritative way, not because the professional has first-hand knowledge of the appropriateness of the term or class, but because the professional relies on second-hand knowledge gained from cognitive authorities” (Mai 2011, p. 118). Folksonomies, on the other hand, allow anyone to take part in creating meaning by assigning tags to objects of which each user has a more personal understanding. Users are put in charge “first-hand” of assigning tags to information in ways that will prove meaningful to each individual. This level of personal significance cannot be achieved when professionals are in charge of classifying information. However, although folksonomies put people in charge of their own organising of information, that is not to say that their way of classification is so very dissimilar to the recognized “professional” way. As a study by Spiteri (2007) shows, on the whole, users create “tags [that] correspond closely to the NISO guidelines pertaining to types of concepts expressed, the predominance of single terms and nouns, and the use of recognized spelling. Problem areas pertain to the inconsistent use of count nouns and the incidence of ambiguous tags in the form of homographs, abbreviations, and acronyms” (p. 13). Spiteri, then, perceives certain problems related to folksonomies, including: inconsistency (plural versus singular, how to express a space between words, etc.), ambiguous abbreviations, different ways of spelling the same word, and so forth.
Folksonomies in Action
The author finds the utilisation of free tagging to be most helpful in organising her own information on the web. For example, in the blog used for this course, she is able to assign different tags to each post. These tags are ones that she will remember and understand – a way to keep her thoughts organised and to let readers of these blog entries see the topic of the entries. More and more websites use the folksonomy method: Delicious, Flickr, Tumblr, etc. Twitter even ranks tags by their overall usage by all users and lists the most popular ones as “trending”.
A key feature of folksonomies is the ability of people to see the tags assigned to objects by other people: “such sites allow users to publicly tag and share their resources, so that they can not only classify information for themselves, but can also browse the information classified by others” (Park 2011, p. 515). The purpose of implementing tags is “to share, discover, and recover them” (Park 2011, p. 516). Users label information so that they can share this information more easily with others, can find similar information posted by others, and can organise information in a way that makes it more readily accessible to them.
There are three ways for users to interact within a folksonomy: “tagging, navigation, and knowledge sharing” (Park 2011, p. 516). In many folksonomies, users can track tags of interest to them in order to find information objects tagged with the same phrases. However, users may label the same objects differently to other users if their point of view of the objects is different. As Mai (2011) concludes: “The practice of meaning-making, representing, and organizing information objects has been enriched by the pressure from the social technologies and movements to involve everyone–and to allow for a plurality of viewpoints and opinions” (p. 120). Park (2011) states that “Probabilistic approaches emphasize that categorization is not merely a conceptual structure identifying the world, but a cognitive process closely associated with the individual perception” (p. 520). Users are in charge of meaning-making in folksonomies. They assign tags to information which are relevant to the way that they perceive the information and which let other users know of their views on the presented information. While users create many tags that hold significance to only (or mainly) themselves, many tags are also, in a manner of speaking, agreed upon by larger groups of users: “Communal categories are generated in a social context where users interact with each other. When users share their categories and contents, they tend to use the suggested popular categories, or imitate others’ category formation” (Park 2011, p. 520). In other words, organisation schemes as utilised by other users are often widely adopted and a consensus of sorts is reached as to what an object means or is or at least what it should be tagged as meaning. On some websites, such as Delicious, tags are suggested to a user if they were employed by other users or by the original poster in reference to the given the information object (Spiteri 2007).
In some ways, folksonomies can provide a more accurate view of classification: “The strength of folksonomy is the ability of any given user to organize the world as he or she sees it…. Therefore, a folksonomy can reflect the users’ conceptual model more accurately” (Park 2011, p. 520). Folksonomies and tags provide users with the freedom to define the world as they see it and thus their place in society and how they see objects as fitting into the grander scheme:
“Tagging does not aim to create a strict classification of objects, but rather allows a user to categorize an object according to their own interests with their own keywords. Although a few words alone cannot identify user interests, a culture of mass participation leads to social interaction among users, and influences the use of terms in a community” (Kim, Decker, and Breslin 2010, p. 58).
Users are given the means to shape the definition of information and to connect with other users who share the same definitions and views.
Spiteri (2007) advocates that “folksonomies could serve as a powerful, flexible tool for increasing the user-friendliness and interactivity of public library catalogs, and also may be useful for encouraging other activities, such as informal online communities of readers and user-driven readers' advisory services” (p. 13). Certainly, the further use of folksonomies is something that would be interesting to research. Perhaps the next step in this area is a more widespread use of this system; maybe it will become the norm for Web 2.0 and libraries can find a way of including such a system in their catalogues in order to assist users in sense-making in relation to library sources.
Folksonomies allow users to become a part of the classification process and have a say in the way that information is organised. These systems “would not work without the users… because tag assignments are used as information source to provide diverse features such as recommendation, search, or exploration features” (Abel et al. 2010, p. 34). It is therefore very much a system of organisation run and maintained by the people who use it. By using the system to define information, users also in effect define the system itself. They create tags that are relevant to their specific thoughts and needs and relate to the information in ways that are meaningful to them. Kim, Decker, and Breslin (2010) note that “tags can be seen as objects for sharing, exchanging, and integrating a user’s interests through tags attached to social objects on various Web 2.0 sites. Tag sharing can be an alternative method towards creating new knowledge from heterogeneous platforms” (p. 58). They go on to add that “The ease of participation [in folksonomies] leads users to express their interests in diverse resources to create a bottom-up consensus view of the world” (Kim, Decker, and Breslin 2010, p. 60). Thus, tags give users the means to negotiate meaning and form new knowledge by the ways in which they organise information. Users can construct a worldview and share it with other users by implementing the folksonomy system. There are many positive aspects of using this approach to information organisation: “The collective and self-motivated approach of social tagging offers novel opportunities to users, including flexibility with information organization, enhanced findability, and serendipitous browsing with respect to information activities” (Kim, Decker, and Breslin 2010, p. 60). Tagging, in other words, allows users to locate information in ways that make sense to their own experience and also to find new related information and knowledge that are labelled with the same tags.
Conclusion
It is easy to see that folksonomies present a very different means of organising and classifying information than do more traditional classification systems. With folksonomies, users are given to power to define what an information object means to them. Users can express to others how they see objects and can also gain a greater understanding of how other users see these same objects. The use of tags allows users more control over the world of information and more say in how they organise their worldview. The advent of folksonomies has given users a more active role in the creation, definition, and organisation of Web 2.0.
References
Abel, F. et al., 2010. Leveraging search and content exploration by exploiting context in folksonomy systems. New Review of Hypermedia & Multimedia, 16 (1/2), 33-70. Available from: http://www.ebscohost.com. [Accessed 8 January 2012].
Kim, H., Decker, S., and Breslin, J.G., 2010. Representing and sharing folksonomies with semantics. Journal of Information Science, 36 (1), 57-72. Available from: http://www.ebscohost.com. [Accessed 8 January 2012].
Mai, Jens-Erik, 2010. Folksonomies and the new order: authority in the digital disorder. Knowledge Organization, 38(2), 114-122. Available from: http://www.ebscohost.com. [Accessed 10 December 2011].
Park, H., 2011. A conceptual framework to study folksonomic interaction. Knowledge Organization, 38 (6), 515-529. Available from: http://www.ebscohost.com. [Accessed 6 January 2012].
