Abstract

From Govcamp

During the last few years, a new kind of trend has emerged on the world wide web: folksonomy. It is a portmanteau word combining folk and taxonomy, first coined by Thomas Vander Wal. Users are generating metadata by adding freely chosen words or tags for describing WWW content. The consolidation of all these tags or metadata leads to a bottom-up taxonomy, a taxonomy created by the folk. Delicious, the social bookmark manager and Flickr, the photo manager, are famous examples of folksonomy enabled websites. These websites allow users not only to retrieve their own bookmarks/photos by entering tags, but also the ones tagged by other people. Some people believe that an integration of folksonomy with the formal semantics of ontologies, could be an added value for further development of the semantic web. Since enterprises and governments have adopted the internet-based technology in their intranets, their is reasonable chance they will do this also with folksonomies. Intranets are - just like the WWW - dealing with an enormous amount of content, which has to be categorized for optimizing searchability. However, the act of (social) tagging resulting in a folksonomy, can also be used for other purposes than information retrieval on intranets. The purpose of this presentation is discussing the other implementation possibilities and advantages of tagging.