What is a Folksonomy?
In contrast to a taxonomy, which can be roughly translated as “classification management”, a folksonomy is a classification scheme that uses a crowd rather than experts to parse content. The idea of a folksonomy is closely related to tagging, which has enjoyed great vogue in online circles since 2005 at least. The word folksonomy is a combination of folks, meaning “people”, and -onomy, meaning “management”. Literally, this can be taken to mean “management by people” and has nothing to do with classification – which comes from the prefix tax- – but the meaning is usually easy to intuit from context. It is also a relatively new word, so it usually comes with a definition when mentioned in text. Tagging is exemplified by the social bookmarking service del.ic.ious, which originally started out as a part-time project by a single person, but was quickly acquired by Yahoo for 60 million US dollars (USD). Del.ic.ious lets you tag any webpage you visit with relevant words to describe its conten
A folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs and Web links, using open-ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, however, their use may occur in other contexts. The folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information easily to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by and familiar to its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us, although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of folksonomy.
