Folksonomy
| Collection | GlossariumBITri |
|---|---|
| Author | Eva Carbonero Jorge Morato-Lara |
| Editor | José Antonio Moreiro |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Number | 1 |
| ID | 42 |
| Object type | Concept |
| Domain | Social Web |
| es | folksonomía |
| fr | folksonomie |
| de | folksonomien |
Folksonomies are a set of terms (called tags) collected from the Natural Language. These tags are used to describe web resources semantically.
Context. This term belongs to the Social Web vocabulary. In social tagging, users describe their own or external social web resources with tags.
Advantages:
- Easy to use. Folksonomies are a simple and friendly solution to describe resources.
- Cheap. Everybody is able to employ tagging, without a prior training in either indexing techniques or controlled vocabularies.
- The vocabulary fits the resource, even when the resource is quite specific. The user can describe the resources with his own terms. Once the term is used, the folksonomy includes the term as a tag.
Disadvantages:
- Tags are ambiguous due to polisemy and synonyms. Frequently, systems just allow assigning simple terms instead of more specific compound terms; therefore increasing ambiguity.
- Tags might have orthographical and typing errors.
- Tags are arbitrarily assigned without an indexing policy.
- There might be no semantic relationship between terms.
Origin. Term coined by Thomas Van Der Wal, merging the terms folk (popular) and taxonomy.
Examples:
- Flicker: Application to manage, share and retrieve photos on line. Every user describes their own photos with relevant tags.
- Youtube: Application to share video online.
- Del.icio.us: Application to tag web pages. Users can index other web pages.
Folksonomies and ontologies. The goal of Folksontologies is to build an ontology from a folksonomy. This implies linking every tag from a folksonomy with semantic relationships. This allows to achieve shared conceptualizations used by users.
Related Resources
- Flicker: http://www.flickr.com
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com
- Del.icio.us: http://delicious.com
References
- VANDER WAL, Thomas. “Folksonomy Coinage and Definition”. (Online) <http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html> [Consulted 1/11/2009]
- MORATO, J.; SÁNCHEZ-CUADRADO, S.; FRAGA, A.; MORENO, V. (2008). Hacia una web semántica social. El profesional de la Información, Enero-febrero 2008, vol. 17, núm. 1.