Apparently ‘folksonomy’ is “one of the most heavily used terms in the Web 2.0 vocabulary”.
By show of hands, how many of you have heard of it?
Don’t be shy, it was completely new to me until last week when we at Nature (London) were invited to a talk by Thomas vander Waal.
Basically, “folksonomy” has to do with collaborative tagging to categorise objects like articles, blogposts or forum topics, something that we are gently prompted to do in the Nature Network.
When I started using the Nature Network, I thought of tagging in terms of adding keywords – i.e. search terms that other people could use to find, in this case, my blog posts. After a while I decided that tagging for this purpose was unnecessary as the search function searches all of the words in our blogs or forum posts, so I (temporarily) stopped doing it.
During this excellent talk, however, I realised that I had never thought to use the tagging for my own benefit, i.e. to organise the information on the Network that was of interest to me.
So, as an experiment, I added tags to all of my blog posts; and looked at the results on my “all tags” page (you can to yours, or anyone elses for that matter, by scrolling to the bottom of your profile page and clicking “All Tags”):
You will notice that they are divided into three groups. All of the ones in the “rising” block were used by me yesterday. The stable ones are those that I used during my tags-are-keywords phase. Clicking on a term will lead you to a page listing the objects that you tagged with that term.
In order for this tagging thing to useful for organising and retrieving information, I think that I need to minimise the number of terms that I use and/or be careful about using tags that are likely to only apply to one object. For example, I should get rid of “gruinard island”. It would also be good to decide on 10 general topics that I find interesting and try to use these descriptors consistently.
It’s an interesting area, though I prefer the hard-core thesauri for my fix.
I remember back in the good old days of Gopher and early Web when we were struggling to categorise all these new information resources that were coming online. It became clear that existing indexing tools and subject categorisations were not adequate to categorise all the new kinds of object that were out there.
I see tagging as one answer to that problem, but perhaps not the complete answer.
I am not sure what you mean by “hard-core thesauri”, though in trying to work it out I have come across some interesting ideas/websites:
Ontology
The concept hierarchy of The Protein Ontology
What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model?
I also found a really cool search/ontology? site called GoPubMed. This latter, at least superficially, looks like quite a powerful resource.
Anyway. I suppose what I would like to know is how can I make the ideas of tagging and using thesauri or ontologies “work” for me?
At the moment I am overwhelmed by the amount of information out there AND overwhelmed by the possibilities of how I am going to find and organise the bits that are of interest to me!!
Perhaps you can point me in the right direction?
Post script
Thanks for the link to the alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb site. That was surreal. In a good way.