semweb2slide34
From CommerceNet Wiki
| Prev Slide | Index | Next Slide |
Tags are personalized labels for describing Web content - web pages, blogs, news stories, photos, and the like. In the example shown here, the photo has been tagged with a variety of terms including "china", "buildings", and "fountain". Collectively, the set of tags adopted by a community to facilitate the sharing of content is known as a folksonomy.
Folksonomies organize knowledge differently than traditional classification hierarchies. While tags often correspond to traditional subject headings or categories, they can also represent more subjective descriptors: “cool”, “recommended”, “reading list”, and so forth. Moreover, folksonomies are flat: categories can overlap and items can be classified in multiple ways. Instead of force-fitting an item into a traditional classification hierarchy such as "Dewey Decimal", just affix all the tags that apply. Most people find this easier and more intuitive than agonizing over whether the picture shown should be classified under China, buildings, fountains or vacations.
But the most defining characteristic of folksonomies are that they evolve through mass collaboration within a community, rather than through the dedicated efforts of one (or a few) expert designers. Unlike most ontologies developed by AI researchers, folksonomies are always widely used, at least within the community that evolved them.
