LawLibTech

Tom Reamy
KAPS Group
http://www.kapsgroup.com
Presentation will be up on the Kaps Group web site in a couple of days

Esseintials of Folksonomies

Wikipedia: a folksonomy is an internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorieze content such as web pages, online photographs and web links

A folksonomy is most notably contrasted with a taxonomy - done by users, not professionals.
Example sites - Delicious and Flickr.
It's just metadata that users add.

Advantages
Simple to use - no complex structure to learn
Lower cost of categorization - distributes cost of tagging over large population
Open-ended - can respond quickly to changes - new terms find their way into foksonomies very quickly.
Relevance - user's own terms. Tags tend to be more relevant to end users.
Support serendipitious form of browsing.

Easy to tag any object - photo, document, bookmatrk
Better than no tags at all.
Getting people excited about metadata. People want to tag.

Disadvantages
Quality of the tags
They don't work very well for finding - re-finding is of marginal value.
No structure, no conceptual relationships. Flat lists do not a onomy make.
Issues of scale - popular tags already showing a millions of 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 peole can't tag very well. It's a learned skill.
Errors - mispellings, etc.

Dangers of Folksonomies
Unwisdom of Crowds - "We find that whole communitied suddently fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit, that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion..."
Tyranny of the majority - Popularity drowns out quality
Belief that hieraarchy, taxonomy not needed.

Will Social networking make better Folksonomies?
Not so far - example of Del.icio.us - same tags dominate
Quality and popularity are very different things
Most people don't tag, don't re-tag.
Study - folksonomies follow NISO guidelines - nouns, etc - but do they actually work?

Most tags deal with computers and are created by people that love to do this stuff - not regular users and infrequent users.

Flickr Facets
Screams out for faceted navigation. Combines strength of structure and personal perspectives. Over 90% of content falls into basic facets. Places were 40% of the tags in flickr. Other facets were events, date, people, things/animals, color. If you take those 6 facets, you have 90% of the flickr content. Could set up a faceted navigation using these 6 facets making it easier for people to find what they're looking for. Subject matter of the photo was less thatn !% of the tags.

Most sites don't support phrases, which is a big problem.

Del.icio.us Tags, not facets
High level topics - photography, news, education
Get related terms by popularity, not conceptual
For this to work, people have to tag with more than one tag.
There's one facet that stood out in Delicious analysis - howto, tutorial, toread, todo, haveread
Popularity is not quality - dominance of computer terms. Tyranny of the majority - design has 1 million hits, interior design 3,909. parts of the community that aren't popular get swamped by the majority.

Delicious - Folksonomy Finability
Too many hits
No plurals, stemming
Personal tags - cool, fun, funny were popular tags.
Good for social research, not finding documents or sites.
How good for personal use? Funny is time dependent.

Folksonomies are a lot like search logs and can be helpful in the same way.

Improving the Quality - Internet Sites
Add automatic facets - Flickr - Design facet system, one time cost, some monitoring
Cluster tags - Taxonomy / Ontology- entity extraction, populate facets and subjects.
Put in a mchanism for ranking tags and taggers.

Folksonomy and Libraries

Three contexts - library catalog, internet service, enterprise

Library Thing
Book people aren't much better at tagging.
high level concepts - psychology (55,000)
Issue - variety of terms - cognitive science - need at least 40 other tags to cover the field
Strange tags - book (9,000)
combination of facets and topics.

What Won't Work
Traditional library strategies - improve users. Goes against the whole idea of them being easy to use.
Social networking won't lead to better tags.
Either/Or - folksonomies or LCSH

What Might Work
Semantic Infrastucture and Evolution - set up an envionment with social, dynamic rules.

Reduce folk and Increase 'onomy". Wikkipedia will be hiring 2,000 editors. There will be rankings for editors.
Increase Folk - add discussions and social context to tags.

Can mean new roles for librarians.

Enterprise Content Management, KM Platforms
Right place to add metadata - of all kinds, not just keywords.
Policy support
Add tag clouds to input page.

Have to rank everything.

Start with formal taxonomy
Add tagging
Facets

library 2.0 - focus on social collaboration, not tagging.
Foksonomies can help - but they need help to evolve into better quality.
Folksonomies are a great source for firs drafts and social research.
Evolution, not Revolution!

IL2007