Valentin's Blog

Recently I skimmed over the (interesting) proceedings of the "Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0" workshop. What surprised me was, that for all the papers talking about Folksonomies, there was no convincing definition of Folksonomy. So I thought I share one with you:

A Folksonomy is the computer stored record of the use of labels by many people.

This might be a bit surprising at first, but I think it'll become clearer when I discuss two often used candidate definitions:

First, wikipedia: "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". The problem with this definition (and all that argue a similarity to taxonomies) is that the most salient feature of a Taxonomy is the explicit representation of a hierarchical structure - and that's something a Folksonomy lacks. So in this sense a Folksonomy is more like a controlled vocabulary - except that it isn't controlled .... so that leads nowhere.

Second, based on Peter Mikas groundbreaking "Ontologies are us" paper some people say that a Folksonomy is a tripartite graph of persons, concepts and documents. There's nothing wrong with that, but for me that's still an incomplete definition because it does not try to capture what is represented by this graph; it only talks about the very basic structure.  

In the end a Folksonomy really only is a computer accessible sample of the use of language to name things. But then - naming things is at the core of language, conceptualizations and ontologies, and having a simple way to observe it (as imperfect as it may be) is no small thing!

Labels: SemanticWeb, SOBOLEO