Information classification (Part III) - Folksonomies

In two of my previous posts I talked about taxonomies and folk taxonomies. These two are methods of classifying information, the former being highly structured and the latter being more of a method of information classification that is embedded in a specific group’s culture. In this post I’m going to look at a method of information classification that has no inherent structure - folksonomies.

So what is a folksonomy? In essence, it’s the product of free text tagging done predominantly on the web. What I particularly like about them is their user-driven approach to organising information. Unlike a taxonomy is has no real structure and the meaning of the words are specific to the author who writes the tag.

Sites with folksonomies include two basic capabilities: they let users add “tags” to information and they create navigational links out of those tags to help users find and organise that information later.

I’m just going to use two examples, Flickr and del.icio.us, but there are others like blogging, that use the same approach. In fact, this is a big growth area in the web at the moment, so take note – because very soon (IMHO) everyone will want to move in this direction in some way or other!

Flickr

Essentially, Flickr is a website for sharing photos. Users upload photos, classify the photos in their own words by using keywords or tags. This method of classifying information then allows others to search or browse using those tags.

Del.icio.us

Delicious is, essentially, an online bookmark repository - very handy if, like me, you use different computers and have trouble keeping all your bookmarks synchronised. Bookmarks are categorised by the individual with tags. I can see all my tags and bookmarks and also what information other people are tagging and bookmarking. If I’m interested in knowledge management and use the tag ‘km’ then I can use delicious to see what everyone else is tagging with km. That saves me doing google searches and finding what’s interesting and worth reading because otehrs have already done this for me!

What do flickr and delicious have in common?

Sites that use tags build their classification based on the ways their users think about their own information. As such, no one is prescribing how they should classify their own stuff, instead, over time, you get a picture of how the users collectively think about their information.

When to use a folksonomy

Some people make the mistake of trying to build a taxonomy when they don’t have a complete picture of the information that needs classifying. What they end up with is an incomplete way of organising their information. When new information comes in it’s likely they’ll have to try and redesign their taxonomy. The advantage with using a folksonomy is that you don’t need to know everything before you start.

If you want ot hand classifying of information over to your users, allowing them to describe things in their own terms means greater take-up. The last thing they want to do is try and use someone else’s world-view to classify and organise their own stuff.

So, if you trust your users enough to allow them to classify their own information, have the right tools to support it, then folksonomies could be for you.

Business benefits

As an knowledge/information management consultant, I tend to talk about folksonomies to business as having the following benefits:

• Low cost of development – people just start tagging
• Low cost of infrastructure – uses existing low-cost, open source and often free internet technologies
• No specialist taxonomists required – elimination of bureaucracies of cataloguers and indexers [1]
• Increase in take-up – because you can organise and re-organise things your own way you can tag things the way you to, to suit how you work
• No learning curve (it’s easy) – you don’t have to learn someone else’s view of the world. Users tag things the way that they see the universe, not the way that someone else sees the universe making the author the authority when it comes to what he intended his work to be about.
• Highly adaptive – because the user decides what to tag something and can use multiple tags
• Doesn’t reinvent the wheel – users can make use of folk taxonomies or the shared vocabulary of existing social networks. You may even start to use tags via offering lists of existing terms in folk taxonomies. An employee-generated folksonomy could therefore be seen as an “emergent enterprise taxonomy”.

Some folksonomy advocates believe that it is useful in facilitating workplace democracy and the distribution of management tasks among people actually doing the work. I just know, as a psychologist, that it can increase acceptance of difference in the workplace – that there is “more than one way to describe the cat” because multitudes of tags are possible and indeed welcome. And then when you look at the folksonomy that has been built, well let’s just say that it can reveals much about the mindset of your users - what they think is interesting, how they think about their own work.

Problems using folksonomies

There are lots of people who think folksonomies are the Spawn of Satan, that they are somehow inferior to ‘real’ classification schemes like taxonomies, it’s unsystematic and, from an information scientist’s point of view, often labeled unsophisticated. Furthermore:

• It’s imperfect - the tags used probably won’t ever be sufficient for an information classification specialist, like a librarian or a records manager. The tags only represent the authors guess, in his own words, what his content is about
• Polysemy & synonyms – the tags don’t distinguish between words that have multiple and/or related meanings
• Meta-noise – some tags might not be relevant to some users
• Scalability – some suggest it gets messy when it gets big
• It’s new - people are afraid to try new things sometimes

Folksonomies might be new, but they are quickly growing in populatiry, particularly with users because for once in their lives they have a tool that allows them to describe their own work in their own way. It allows other people to find information by using the tags in the folksonomy as a way of navigating to all the other items with that tag. Yes, they have their weaknesses, but placed site-by-side with a taxonomy, you get a great way of finding information.

In the traditional information classification space (or even information architecture space) we create lots of artefacts like site maps, navigation systems, and taxonomies. In creating all these things we really should be asking ourselveswhether our information models are built on the assumption that a single way to organise things can suit all users, one IA to rule them all, so to speak.

IAs should ask themselves this important question because people often model information without thinking about the way that Joe Citizenthinks about information and the way he’s interested in seeing it. To Joe, information is often about relationships – how bits of information fit with other pieces of information in his universe.

This is a reminder that, as Thomas Vander Wal said, “the assumption that taxonomies are great and help all people find things by providing the authoritative terms is flawed. Taxonomies are always going to be less than perfect (and most often far less than perfect) for helping people find and re-find information they need because of their view of the world” [3]

While taxonomies are still vital though for providing a foundation structure, we need to also make sure we develop solutions that can help people, like Joe Citizen, whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy – folksonomies can play nice with taxonomies because at least it allows Joe to see the universe in both his own way and the official corporate way.

But is this enough? Is there anything else we can do in order to classify information so it is findable?

There is a way of classifying information whose underlying principle is about making things ‘findable’ – Topic Maps – and itmight provide a way to integrate all these things and give real meaning to knowledge in the way people, rather than machines, think about the relationships between bits of information.

… and that leads me think I need to write another bog entry – Topic Maps … I guess I’ll write up soon.

M

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[1] [2] David Weinberger. “Tagging and why it matters.” Retrieved November 10, 2006 from <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/2005-07>.

3] Thomas Vander Wal. Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy.