Session B303 - Folksonomies and Tagging: Libraries & the Hive Mind October 31, 2007

Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect, KAPS Group

Cautionary quote about folksonomies - “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate conviction.” -W.B. Yeats

Essentials of Folksonomies

• folksonomy is done by users, taxonomy is done by professionals
• basically what it comes down to is that it is metadata that users add
• key - social mechanism for seeing others’ tags

Advantages

• Very simple to use - no need to learn a difficult classification system
• lower cost of categorization - distribute the cost over a large population
• Open ended - respond quickly to changes
• Relevance - users’ own terms
• supports a serendipitous form of browsing
• easy to tag any type of an object - photos, docs, bookmarks
• better than no tags at all
• gets people excited about metadata

Disadvantages - related to quality of tags

• they don’t work well for finding - re-finding is of marginal value
• no structure, no conceptual relationships - flat lists do not an “onomy” make - there is only popularity
• issues of scale - popular tags already showing a million hits
• limited applicability - only useful for non-technical or non-specialist domains
• either personal tags (other’s can’t find) or popularity tags - lose interesting terms. Most people can’t tag very well. Tagging is a learned skill.
• errors - misspellings, bad compounds, etc.

Dangers

• Unwisdom of crowds, madness of crowds
• Tyranny of the majority, popularity drowns quality, narrowing of choices, lost content
• belief that hierarchy, taxonomy not needed

Will Social Networking make better Folksonomies?

• Not so far - the same tags are dominating on del.icio.us
• quality and popularity are very different things
• most people don’t tag, and don’t re-tag
• study - folksonomies follow NISO guidelines - nouns, etc. - but do they actually work to get you where you want to go? - no
• most tags are created by heavy computer users, who love to do this stuff - the regular users and infrequent users aren’t good taggers

Flickr Facets

• his organization analyzed flickr tag clouds - 90% of content falls into 6 different types of facets (place (40% of tags), events, dates, people, things/animals, color).
• Subject matter of photograph was less than 1% of the tags
• If Flickr added facets, it would be a whole lot more useable

Del.icio.us

• tags are not facets, they are subjects
• high-level topics - photography, news, education
• get related terms by popularity, not conceptually
• one type of facet stood out - “howto” “tutorial” “toread” “todo” etc.
• popularity is not quality - dominance of computer terms, tyranny of the majority - “design” - 1 million, “interior design” - 3,909
• top 25 - same set, slight order shift - social inertia
• folksonomy findability - too many hits, no plurals or stemming, personal tags like “cool” “fun” and “funny” - good for social research, not for finding documents or sites

Folksonomies are really good for social research

Improving the Quality of Folksonomies

• adding facets to Flickr
• Clustering tags - taxonomy/ontology, entity extraction, populate facets and subjects, types of relationships
• add a broad general taxonomy of most popular tags - tags as natural categories (dog, rather than “mammal” or “purebred golden retriever”)
• evolve quality of tags and emerging structure of tags - preferred terms, ranking tags

Folksonomies and Libraries

• Three contexts: Library Catalog, Internet Service, Enterprise (Knowledge Management) contributor
• PennTags, Stanford - librarians find good sites to tag
• LibraryThing - still high level concepts, not that much better at tagging, issue is the variety of terms, strange tags - 19,000 tags of “book”, combination of facets and topics, inconsistencies, redundancies

There is a lot of in-between between folksonomies and LCSH

What might work: semantic infrastructure and evolution, dynamic social rules, reduce the amount of “folk” and increase “onomy” (example: Wikipedia hiring editors, ranking articles), also can increase “folk” - not just see tags, discuss tags