folksonomy

It was very interesting this week reading further into the pros and cons of tagging and folksonomies. As in last week's post, I remain intrigued by the way folksonomies can be a great complement to controlled classification methods, balancing out each other's weaknesses with their own unique strengths. In refuting the disadvantages of folksonomies in The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, Kroski in many cases transforms the weaknesses of folksonomies into strengths.

First off, I found the that the
readings this week filled my head with all sorts of different thoughts on what
folksonomies are and their usefulness, and some big words were thrown in for
good measure (Kroski talks about ‘ontology’ and I nearly fell out of my chair).
So, after reading the articles and looking elsewhere for some definitions, I
have come up with my own definition for what ‘folksonomy’ means (with thanks to
Kroski and Funk and Wagnalls):

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.