Week 8: What folks? and Whose ontology?

Folksonomy, or ‘folks' and ‘taxonomy', has come to mean "non-hierarchical ontology created as a natural result of user-added metadata or tagging."

Reading through various articles on the subject, I have no conclusions as to how I feel about it.  Rather, I believe there are bits of good and bits of bad.

Here's why;

Folksonomy represents current trends in language and classification. It is the most up-to-date version of the LCA (Library of Congress Authority) one can find.

Folksonomy does not have the same problems as LCA does with currency and politically correct language. It does not take 10 years to edit and publish a new edition.

It's fluid. It's now.

With this comes the real possibility that researchers/historians/sociologists will be unable to look back upon folksonomy trends in the future. They won't be able to open web pages from 2006 to view how people were classifying the world around them. (Well, at least not yet. I don't like to assume someone won't invent an automatic archiving system for the entire WWW and make me eat my words. You never know).

At present, I wonder if this lack of documentation will lead us into the new millennium with a twenty decade gap in online information. A second dark age, if you will.

            For the moment, folksonomy is heralded as a new and exciting way of dealing with online information. Kroski states that "taxonomies utilize a controlled vocabulary which is exclusionary by nature; folksonomies include everyone's vocabulary and reflect everyone's needs without cultural, social or political bias."

While it is true that folksonomies are less structured and non-dependant upon our elder white forefathers, I hesitate to use this absolutist language.

Folksonomies reflect everyone's needs? Without cultural social or political bias?

Who is everyone? Those individuals with internet who are savvy enough to know about these new classification techniques? And how does society differentiate their classification without bias? Nearly two paragraphs down Shirky points out that "the movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Cultural beliefs and connotations are alive and well. We differentiate between subjects by our cultural beliefs and influences. While folksonomies come from a broader audience, it is still on an individual basis that subjects are catalogued. Human bias is everywhere.

            Perhaps it's the multitude of personal bias that turns folksonomy into one large representative conglomerate of online opinion. A direct indication of the social online atmosphere.

          Yet just because it is new, doesn't necessarily negate it from a major flaws. Lack of synonyms, recall, precision, and gaming are all problems that come from being unable to retrieve information (100%) successfully.

            Perhaps it is the fault of the catalogers, who were always striving for a flawless system. Maybe our expectations are too high. When it comes to cataloging (which seems to be continually on the verge of dying out and being replaced), a new surge of interest and need emerges. For that I applaud.

            However, the two forms of classification cannot be compared. The old tested and true version based on consistency and reliability works. It can be out of date, slow and difficult to navigate, but the new classification can be tricky, misleading and difficult to navigate. When comparing the two different types, each type of cataloging works best for its specific area of expertise. If we were to run around the library putting books back where we thought they should go it would take a long time for us to find anything. However, if we tried to classify the entire web from the top down we would still be forever searching for links and url's. The internet moves in circles, back flips and flying leaps at an Olympic speed. I say we employ the entire web universe and classify away. After all, it will all be different tomorrow anyway.