Tag Archives: folksonomies

KO

Many to many

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

A wise taxonomist once said to me “taxonomies are technology agnostic” and I’ve been thinking about why systems are not taxonomy agnostic. If you underpin a taxonomy with a thesaurus, can you use that to map one taxonomy to another, without altering either taxonomy? You can keep both taxonomies as metadata attached to your asset and expose one or the other depending on user choice. It’s just an interface issue. The mapping would enable cross navigation, so you could wander down one taxonomy, skip to another, then pop back to the first one if you wanted.

You could attach folksonomies too if you wanted to, and just store those as extra metadata.

I can see that there might be terminology issues that need resolving (no small task), or perhaps software or storage issues, but I can’t see why the system itself couldn’t work in theory.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about mediating stakeholder needs to get the best taxonomy, and that is still a valid approach when you need management and control, but I don’t see any reason not to attach other taxonomies to your core taxonomy. Those satellite taxonomies can then serve minority interests or specialised needs. As long as you collect metadata about your taxonomies and make it clear to your user the provenance of the taxonomy or folksonomy they are viewing, you can offer a range of viewpoints.

Perhaps I am missing something obvious, but it seems there is still debate about getting the best taxonomy, or choosing to implement one instead of another. That debate seems to be based on the presumption that you can only have one taxonomy at a time, but why not have lots?

KO

Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work?

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work? | Earley & Associates confirms my suspicion that people aren’t as enthusiastic about content tagging at work as they are at home, tagging for fun or when it is their own content. As usual, it’s all about context. There are lots of ways tagging can work at work, but it isn’t reliable for core or high value asset management and information retrieval.

Taxonomies are sometimes criticised for not being scalable (or at least not scalable cheaply), but folksonomies only work really well when the scale is massive (e.g. web-wide). Most enterprises are right in the middle, which is presumably why synergistic solutions remain popular.

Here’s a similar take: Explicit and implicit metadata @ CommonPlace.Net.

The ever excellent Green Chameleon covered another aspect: Green Chameleon » The War Between Awareness and Memory.