Are the terms ontology, taxonomy, and folksonomy interchangeable?
Ontology: n : the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence Taxonomy: 1. The classification of organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships. 2. The science, laws, or principles of classification; systematics. 3. Division into ordered groups or categories: “Scholars have been laboring to develop a taxonomy of young killers” (Aric Press). I’d say they are not interchangeable. Unless there is some new ad agency speak that the dictionary hasn’t heard of yet.
I suppose people often use ontology and taxonomy interchangeably (incorrectly so, but harmlessly incorrect, usually), but you wouldn’t throw folksonomy into the same bag, since it’s very distinct from both of them. Take this with a grain of salt, but here’s my best try: A taxonomy is just a classification of things. They are usually hierarchical. They do two things: give exact names for everything you’re dealing with (your ‘domain’) and show which things are parts of other things (sometimes called parent-child relationships, sometimes called broader-narrower). An ontology is like a taxonomy in that it is going to contain all the entities in your domain (for one reason or another–probably its roots in philosophy–people often seem to use the term “universe” when talking about the domain of an ontology), and show the relationships they have to each other. However, it does more: it has strict, formal rules (a “grammar”) about those relationships that let you make meaningful, precise stat
They are interchangeable in that they are all constituents of the same medley of jargon people sprinkle liberally over their sentences to sound important, but that’s where–more or else–the similarities end. There was a good discussion of ontology in this AskMeFi thread.
What miniape said: ontology is only properly used, IMNSHO, if you’re doing philosophy. A Taxonomy is an organizational schema for objects or ideas: the Linnean classification system for species, the Dewey decimal system, Library of Congress sytem, etc. A Folksonomy is not an organizational schema at all…instead, it’s the psuedo-organization that grows up around the social tagging of objects, a la del.icio.us or flickr.
I was going to try to write something long, but Hildago did better than I did in our Classification Theory class, so I’ll defer to him. However, there are some examples of taxonomies that are much more simple than Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or Dewey: browse the Seattle City Clerk’s Thesaurus, a very small and specific taxonomy, for example. It’s pretty simple and has few enough terms that you can probably figure most of it out just by looking at it. Also, taxonomies are often invisible in non-library situations. For example, microsoft.com, corbis.com, and gettyimages.com, among many others, all use taxonomies in their search engines, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from doing a search. Folksonomies are, by nature, extremely visible.
