1. Folksonomy Folktales Tom Reamy Chief Knowledge Architect KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services http://www.kapsgroup.com

2. 2 Agenda  Introduction  Folksonomy Folktales  Beyond the Folk Tales – Limits and Advantages of Folksonomies  Hybrid Approach to Taxonomy and Folksonomy  Conclusion

3. 3 KAPS Group: General  Knowledge Architecture Professional Services  Virtual Company: Network of consultants – 12-15  Partners – Inxight, Teragram, Smart logic, Lexalytics, Access Innovation, Endeca, FAST, Interwoven, etc.  Consulting, Strategy, Knowledge architecture audit  Taxonomies: Enterprise, Marketing, Insurance, etc.  Services: – Taxonomy development, consulting, customization – Technology Consulting – Search, Text Analytics, CMS, Portals, etc. – Metadata standards and implementation – Knowledge Management: Collaboration, Expertise, e-learning – Applied Theory – Faceted taxonomies, complexity theory, natural categories

4. 4 Folksonomies – The Next Revolution?  “ Tags are great because you throw caution to the wind, forget about whittling down everything into a distinct set of categories and instead let folks loose categorizing their own stuff on their own terms." - Matt Haughey – MetaFilter  “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate conviction.” - The Second Coming – W.B. Yeats

5. 5 Folksonomy Folktales  90% of what you read about Folksonomies is false or misleading – Beware of true believers!  Folksonomies are better than taxonomies – There is more to taxonomy than the Dewey Decimal System  Folksonomies are revolutionary!  Folksonomies are examples of the wisdom of crowds  Folksonomies are building bottom-up classification systems  Folksonomies are easy to use  Folksonomies have no central authority

6. 6 Folksonomy Folktales: Anti-Taxonomy Myths  Rigid, conservative, centralized, inflexible  Require predicting the future (Can’t change?)  Rigid taxonomies can’t keep up with changing corpus  Taxonomies are influenced by taxonomist / bias – Have to “guess” user’s mind  Taxonomies create one consistent authoritative view  Taxonomies require experts and training  Taxonomies are expensive and difficult

7. 7 Folksonomy Folktales: Limits of Folksonomies  Types of Content – Web sites not documents – Enterprise Content – No - need everything tagged – Enterprise content – No - need to find the official policy document  Needs to be useful to add personal tags - more than 200 items  Quality of tags – plurals, idiosyncratic (box47), book on book site – Poor Findability – too many hits, miss too much  No mechanism for improving quality of tags – Will users actually re-tag - on a large scale?  Differences of expert and non-expert - basic categories  From “Revolution” to “Better than Nothing”

8. 8 Advantages of Folksonomies  Simple (no complex structure to learn) – No need to learn difficult formal classification system  Lower cost of categorization – Distributes cost of tagging over large population  Open ended – can respond quickly to changes  Relevance – User’s own terms  Core Value – finding people with similar interests – Support serendipitous form of browsing  Easy to tag any object – photo, document, bookmark  Better than no tags at all  Getting people excited about metadata!

9. 9 Hybrid Approach to Folksonomy  Real Value – combine with taxonomy – Search & CM  Create a framework within which folksonomies can contribute – Simple Taxonomies + Facets + Clusters/folksonomies + auto- categorization  User-generated tags fed into central editorial group – New terms, changing emphasis  Folksonomy and Facets – Flickr – 80% thing, place, people, event  Research into users categorization – better than search logs – higher order cognitive task – Uncover multiple perspectives that taxonomy needs to cover

10. 10 Conclusion  Folksonomy is not comparable to Taxonomy  Folksonomy not revolutionary – Don’t Believe the Hype!  Folksonomy is useful in some limited contexts  Hybrid middle ground is best to achieve real value – New relationship between authors and taxonomists – Can be useful as Research / Feedback  For More see KMWorld, October 2009: – http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Folksonomy-folktales- 56210.aspx http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Folksonomy-folktales- 56210.aspx

11. Questions? Tom Reamy tomr@kapsgroup.com KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services http://www.kapsgroup.com