Flexibility in Folksonomies
Nick Mote posts his The New School of Ontologies essay, which is a nice overview of formal classification and folksonomies. The folksonomy is a good approach for bottom-up approach to information finding.
In Nick's paper I get quoted. I have cleaned up the quote that came out of an e-mail conversation. This quote pretty much summaries the many discussions I have had in the past couple months regarding folksonomies. Am I a great fan of the term? Not as much of a fan as what they are doing.
The problem of interest to me that folksonomies are solving is cross-discipline and cross-cultural access to information as well as non-hierarchical information structures. People call items different things depending on culture, discipline, and/or language. The folksonomy seems to be a way to find information based on what a person calls it. The network effect provides for more tagging of the information, which can be leveraged by those who have naming conventions that are divergent from the norm. The power law curve benefits the enculturated, but the tail of the curve also works for those out of the norm.
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