Folksonomy
Social tagging is a form of free indexing ( indexing), assign to the users of content descriptors (subject headings ) using various types of social software with no rules. The created in this process collections of keywords are called folksonomies.
Currently, the German language has no equivalent of the common technical term. The well-known English-language expressions for this type of development loud collaborative tagging and social tagging. The hereby granted free keywords are called tags, which collected form a folksonomy. Multiple tags can be visualized together as a tag cloud (word cloud).
Application
The folksonomy finds its application mainly on websites or in the communities they offer to keywording their content. Other users find this information then by searching for a keyword. Popular, in this way objects are indexed by many people blog entries, photos or social bookmarks. The user then act in open communities without fixed indexation rules. The Community indexing serves primarily of subject.
Often one uses the graphical representation of a tag cloud, where the most popular keywords are shown typographically greatest.
Genesis and origin
The origin of the word folksonomy case of "folk taxonomies ", so lay taxonomies is attributed to Thomas Vander Wal. Folksonomy was first used in 2003 on the website del.icio.us.
Jon Udell pointed out in 2004 that this type of indexing is already known, but new is the possibility of feedback by individual users.
A comprehensive study of folksonomies with respect to knowledge representation and information retrieval laid 2009, Isabella Peters.
Advantages over controlled development
Through a folksonomy any user can contribute something to the indexing. So distributed to a categorization effort on many shoulders, on the other hand better results are obtained when the information objects are categorized by those who use them too. Due to the usually large number of users information and relationships that are not noticed the individual should be made visible.
In addition to individual benefits for the self-organization of the individual user this has the possibility to make available to its tag collection to the public. Thus, (which are identified by their headings) to be associated, for example, documents with identical keywords or users with similar interests. The open parts of the KeywordsPlacesAuthorsPublishersYears assignments of the individual with others provided by the Community on the one hand a good search capability ( common opening up of an information space ), it allows individual users but also on the assignment of keywords to users to pay attention to other objects or other points of view.
Disadvantages compared with controlled opening
In the conventional manual development, for example by librarians, classifications or other centrally managed controlled vocabularies are usually used.
Due to the novelty of the technique is absent in the folksonomy an established method of indexing Community. There is no authority that determines which keywords are to use and which are not. The free selection of keywords, there is a fragmentation of the categories; as is for example designated and other plural ( books): the same thing by some users in the singular ( book example). In addition to international communities a folksonomy in different languages (Book, Books, Book, Books, etc.). For composite terms you can, if only a word and not more technically approved are for a delimiter ( open_access ) or coupled together decide ( open access).
Another disadvantage of free tagging is a problem that is caused by synonyms and homonyms: words can - formulated pre-scientific - represent completely different concepts, and the exact meaning of a key word is often unique only to be understood in context. So is, for example, the English word "apple" in common parlance for the fruit apple while in the electronics industry, the company Apple Inc. in the music industry, the record label Apple Records can be meant, or the city of New York as the Big Apple shortened so called can be. Another example: Provides a user 's photos of an international policy summit with speakers Kohl and Bush on a Web application such as Flickr with the keywords Kohl, Bush, Summit - this allows users to find specific photos that match these keywords. As this example shows, the actions of the free indexing is but sometimes problematic because it may lead to ambiguity. In this case, the carbon plants and shrubs as well as Summit, a geomorphological description.
To counteract this problem, related Tags can be displayed and methods of semi-automatic indexing ( suggesting appropriate tags when Tagvergabe ) are used. As a further corrective to the mass of users is considered, which could bring users to be guided by the particular popular buzzword. In addition, data mining methods, as used for example clustering. Thereby groups can be distinguished from each other like resources. In addition, should always be assigned multiple keywords describing the content.