Week:13 Muddy

Although I am familiar with such things as tags and hashtags, I was not familiar with the term folksonomy; and although I've heard the word taxonomy in my education in biology as the classification of species, I was unsure what this meant pertaining to data on the Web. In other words, i understand the ideas, but am interested in fully fledging out the concepts.




Since we discussed Wiki's as a form of Web 2.0 throughout the lessons this week, I will use them as a tool to show how powerful the wisdom of the crowds and crowdsourcing can be, I'll allow Wikipedia to speak for itself. According to Wikipedia, taxonomy is:


 "is the practice and science of classification or the result of it. Taxonomy uses taxonomic units, known as taxa (singular taxon). A resulting taxonomy, a taxonomy, or taxonomic scheme, is a particular classification ("the taxonomy of ..."), arranged in a hierarchical structure or classification scheme. Typically this is organized by supertype-subtype relationships, also called generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships, typically indicated by the phrase 'is a kind of' or 'is a subtype of'. In such an inheritance relationship, the subtype by definition has the same properties, behaviours, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more additional properties, behaviours, or constraints." 


This explanation cleared up little for me, but the article continued:


"Originally taxonomy referred only to the classifying of organisms (now sometimes known as alpha taxonomy) or a particular classification of organisms. It is also used to refer a classification of things or concepts, as well as to the principles underlying such a classification.

Taxonomy is the science which deals with the study of identifying, grouping, and naming organisms according to their established natural relationship.

Almost anything—animate objects, inanimate objects, places, concepts, events, properties, and relationships—may then be classified according to some taxonomic scheme."

I now had a good understanding of where my confusion came from; I was unaware that the use of the word was so wide in scope-- though in hindsight, that makes much sense.

Now where this idea gets really fun is in the postulation that the human mind naturally categorizes its understanding of the work in such systems. The philosopher Immanual Kant theorized such, and some anthropologists have claimed to have witnessed such systems existing in local cultural systems; such a thing is called a folk taxonomy. Which is where we get the term folksonomy, which is discussed in our book, from. However, the terms are not completely synonymous, as we will see. 

A folksonomy specifically refers to categorizing on the Internet. Just like a folk taxonomy it is a taxonomy belonging to a group of people (in the latter a culture or society and in the former the group of users that make up the activity on the Internet). The term folksonomy is attributed to Thomas Vander Wal, a well-known information architect.

Essentially, folksonomies are a way of categorizing web content through the participation of users who create and manage tags. According to Wikipedia, "Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004^[4] as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.^[5] A good example of a social website that utilizes folksonomy is 43 Things."

Most people are familiar with a tag cloud due to the popularity of Twitter.  They look like this:

Photo by:Cyprien