Recently in Taxonomies, Thesaurus', etc. Category

First there were wikis, collaborative web sites, some of which allow anyone to author or edit content, Wikipedia being a prime example. Now there are "folksonomies", a "grass-roots tagging system" for the web, standard subject terms that evolve as individuals attempt to make content available to others.

It's a hard concept to explain, but Newsweek does a good job of it in their recent article "In the New Game of Tag, All of Us Are It."

For librarians, the world really is turning upside down. Rather than using an existing system of subject terms, such as Library of Congress subject headings, to impose order, folksonomies seem evolve from the primordial soup, and according to the article, are surprisingly effective.

Examples of sites that use such tagging schemes are the photo-sharing site, Flickr and del.icio.us, a social bookmark manager.

Spontaneous order from chaos. What's the world coming to!

For a response to the article, and a better explanation of how subject headings really work, see Gary Price's article on SearchEngine.com, Newsweek Talks Tagging.

It can be an expensive and labor intensive proposition to create a taxonomy and/or thesaurus from scratch. Though sometimes your organization's needs are unique and require a custom approach, other times a well-developed, ready-made taxonomy would fit the bill. However, it's not always obvious where to find such an animal.

Taxonomy Warehouse offers a database of available taxonomies on different topics, some of which can be ordered directly from the Warehouse.