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Folksonomy articles

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Here are some articles on folksonomy that I found in a reading list on the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science website.

Peterson, E. (2006). Beneath the metadata: some philosophical problems with folksonomy. D-Lib Magazine, 12(11).

Vander Wal, T. (2007). Folksonomy coinage and definition.

Quintarelli, E. (2005). Folksonomies: power to the people

Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies: cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata.

Golder, S. A. & Huberman, B. A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 32(2). 198-208.

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New method for building multilingual ontologies

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New method for building multilingual ontologies appeared on AlphaGalileo.Org – the Internet-based news centre for European science, engineering and technology. Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) claim to have created a language-independent ontology-building tool. I think it will work very well for consistent well-structured information – for example in catalogues and directories – but it seems to me that it is essentially being an “auto-indexer” that only really works if you control linguistic forms, and perhaps even vocabulary, very tightly. That’s great – and means plenty of work for editors making sure everything is neat, tidy, and consistent to suit the system – but isn’t it going to be an awful lot of work? Or am I massively missing the point?

Applying Turing’s Ideas to Search

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Applying Turing’s Ideas to Search – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design applies the Turing test to the problem of understanding searches in order to provide better results. Ferrara suggests we need to revisit the parsing approach (moving on from the pattern-matching paradigm) and to develop “social ontologies” in order to get better search results. The “social ontologies” are – if I have understood correctly – wikis of relationships that can then be accessed by search engines to make semantic inferences. The ontologies would have to be socially constructed as there is just too much information out there to put it all together any other way. It struck me that this is a bit like what SKOS is essentially hoping to do. Once upon a time I wanted to build a fully linked thesaurus of the English language where every word was linked to every related word, so you could navigate through the entire language, following pathways of meaning, with no word left out. People thought it was a daft idea, but compared with trying to build ontologies of everything, it doesn’t seem so crazy. Just shows how times have changed!

Intranet 2.0: the need for ‘lean intranets’

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Intranet 2.0: the need for ‘lean intranets’ « manIA has some sensible advice on keeping an Intranet efficient and functional. I was drawn to the section where Patrick Walsh discusses “controlled folksonomies”, a phrase he attributes to Christina Wodkte. Essentially, you let content contributors choose their own tags, but prompt them with suggestions. Presumably, people are far more likely just to use the existing tags (thus preserving the underlying controlled vocabulary) most of the time, because it is easier than making up their own. He implies that people could use terms not in the CV, but not what would become of those tags. If they get added to the CV automatically, you would lose the control element as mis-spellings and ambiguous terms etc would slowly creep in. To keep the CV tidy would require some ongoing editorial work. For one of the CMSs used at the BBC, there are rules – once a folksonomic tag has been used a certain number of times, it gets sent to the IA team who can then add it to the core CV if they think it will be useful. Presumably, you also need someone to produce an initial CV in the first place.