Folksonomies: Community Metadata

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Folksonomies Community Metadata? Marieke
Guy Interoperability Focus
UKOLN is supported by
www.bath.ac.uk
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A Brief Introduction

• UKOLN
• Is based at the University of Bath
• Is funded by JISC and MLA
• Has a HE / FE and cultural heritage sector remit
• The Interoperability Focus Team..
• My previous roles.
• My interest in classification and folksonomies.

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Folksonomies?
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What is a Folksonomy?

• Keywords, tags, metadata
• Created by groups/communities who are the
  resource users
• Natural language common understanding
• No hierarchy, no specified parent-child or
  sibling relationships between terms
• Feedback
• Categorisation rather than classification
• Not a taxonomy, not a folks taxonomy

Taxonomy - a subject-based classification that
arranges the terms of a controlled vocabulary
into a hierarchy
Folks taxonomy - Taxonomies that are embedded in
local cultural and social systems, a vernacular
naming system
Taxonomy - a subject-based classification that
arranges the terms of a controlled vocabulary
into a hierarchy
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Categorisation/Classification

• Categorisation
• Less rigorous
• Looks at similarity of items
• Items can have many terms associated with them
• No clearly defined relations between the terms in
  the vocabulary
• E.g. del.icio.us

• Classification
• Rigorous
• Systematic arrangement of items
• Focus is on providing a single classification to
  an item
• Very hierarchical
• E.g.Yahoo!

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Folksonomy Tags

• Tags are pieces of information separate from, but
  related to, an object def. Wikipedia
• People can tag their resources with any tag they
  like
• People tend to use
• Colloquial phrasese.g. blokes, streetperformers
• Localisatione.g. bath, bathspa, england,
  romanbaths
• Personalisatione.g. greatday, myholiday
• subjective qualificatione.g. cold, funny
• http//www.motive.co.nz/glossary/folksonomy.php

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Whats the Animal?

• Flat hierarchy no clearly defined relations
  between the terms
• Can hear some vocalisations that are below the
  range of human hearing
• Eats grass and leaves
• Lives in the African plains
• Weight 3- 6 tonnes
• Very large ears

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Whats the Animal?

• Traditional Classification
• Very hierarchical
• Kingdom - Animalia
• Phylum - Chordata
• Class - Mammalia
• Order - Proboscidea
• Family - Elephantidae
• Genus - Loxodonta

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History of Folksonomies

• Digital networks have increased the ability to
  work ad-hoc and as part of a community
• In the late 1990s Weblogs were popularised, the
  rise of user centred metadata begins
• Del.icio.us, developed by Joshua Schachter, went
  live in late 2003 and the ability to add tags
  using a non-hierarchical keyword categorisation
  system was added in early 2004
• Tagging was quickly replicated by other social
  software
• In late 2004 the Folksonomy name was coined by
  Thomas Vander Wal through a mailing list
• Since early 2005 numerous sites have sprung up
  and Folksonomy is the buzz word of the moment

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Not a New Idea.

• Abandoning taxonomy for lists of keywords is not
  a new idea
• Faceted classification - assignment of multiple
  classifications to an object
• John Udell argues that the fundamental difference
  is feedback
• Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a
  difference in kind. The degree to which these
  systems bind the assignment of tags to their use
  - in a tight feedback loop - is that kind of
  difference.
• Broad folksonomies (lots of users tagging one
  object)
• Narrow folksonomies (a small number of users
  tagging individual items)

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Folksonomy Sites 1

• Bookmarks
• del.icio.us http//del.icio.us/
• Tagsy http//tagsy.com/
• jots http//jots.com/
• BlogMarkshttp//blogmarks.net/
• Connotea http//www.connotea.org/
• CiteULike http//www.citeulike.org/

• Feedmarker http//www.feedmarker.com/

Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A General
Reviewhttp//www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04
hammond.html
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Folksonomy Sites 2

• Images, video and sound
• flikr http//www.flickr.com/
• vimeo http//www.vimeo.com/
• Up to 11 http//www.upto11.net/
• Freesound http//freesound.iua.upf.edu/
• GenieLab http//genielab.com/
• Technorati (blogs) http//www.technorati.com/

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Folksonomy Sites 3

• Other
• Up coming (events) http//upcoming.org/
• Poetry x http//poetryx.com/
• 43 things (goals) http//www.43things.com/
• 24 eyes (rss) http//www.24eyes.com/
• Tagzania (places) http//www.tagzania.com/
• colr.org (colour) http//www.colr.org/

Good list of siteshttp//tagging.pagina.nl/
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Why Create a Folksonomy?

• Because we can. ?
• It is free/cheap
• We enjoy doing it very popular sites
• The Internet is for the masses e.g.Google page
  rank algorythm
• We like being part of a community
• Because its an easy way to give attention to and
  make sense of resources
• Social classification provides insight not just
  into content, but into users and context as well
  (added value)
• Bottom line There is clearly a perceived
  advantage in creating folksonomies

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Strengths of Folksonomies

• Serendipity browsing versus finding
• Cheap and extendable
• Reclaiming the Web
• Quick and responsive to user needs
• Community trust
• People have their own space (unlike with wikis)
• Feedback
• Scalability, easy for everyone to use
• Desire lines classification systems can emerge
• Added value metadata

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Limitations of Folksonomies

• Ambiguity
• Only single words no spaces allowed (only some)
• No homonym, synonyms, hypernym or localisation
  control
• Uncontrolled and chaotic
• Imprecise
• Many tags are single use (del.icio.us say 190,000
  of 200,000), many compound words
• Do not support searching as well as controlled
  vocabularies

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The Future for Folksonomies

• A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of
  the best and worst in the organization of
  information.
• Robin Good

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Implications of Folksonomies

• Fundamental shift in metadata creation user led
• Fundamental trigger for communication and sharing
• Lowers the barriers to cooperation
• New idea meaning comes from our common view of
  the world
• Its got people talking about metadata!!
• Yahoo or Google? Hierarchy doesnt work so well
  on the Web
• But the two models (formal vs informal) are not
  mutually exclusive
• Folksonomies provide a snap shot of the
  understanding and use of terms librarians take
  note!
• Abuse/spam?

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Some Food for Thought1

• Links to more formal systems e.g Folksonomic
  Zeitgeist
• Libraries and Folksonomies
• Tag clustering, tag bundles
• More data on the tags people use
• Educating users and improving tag literacy
• Creating smarter systems
• User profiling, collaborative rank and community
  view on information

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Some Food for Thought2

• Metadata on tags
• Visualising tags - extisp.icio.us, tag.alicio.us,
  facetious, tag maps, geotagging
• Internationalisation
• Shared tags between a community become a
  thesaurus
• More exploration alongside other projects like
  the semantic Web
• Interested in PhilosophisingYoure It Blog on
  tagging - http//www.tagsonomy.com/

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Time for the Panel Session

• Any questions?
• Thanks?