1. Evolving Folksonomies Complexity Theory & Folksonomies Tom Reamy Chief Knowledge Architect KAPS Group Knowledge Architecture Professional Services http://www.kapsgroup.com

2. 2 Agenda  Introduction – What are Folksonomies? – Advantages and Disadvantages of Folksonomies  Complexity Theory and Folksonomies – Environment, Evolutionary Mechanisms – Intelligent Design: Universe of Discourse  Conclusion – Possible Scenario’s for Evolving Order – Research Directions – Benefits

3. 3 KAPS Group  Knowledge Architecture Professional Services (KAPS)  Consulting, strategy recommendations  Knowledge architecture audits  Partners – Convera, Inxight, FAST, and others  Taxonomies: Enterprise, Marketing, Insurance, etc. – Taxonomy customization  Intellectual infrastructure for organizations – Knowledge organization, technology, people and processes – Search, content management, portals, collaboration, knowledge management, e-learning, etc.

4. 4 What are Folksonomies?  Wikipedia: A folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links.  A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy – done by users, not professionals,  Example sites – Del.icio.us and Flickr (not really – no feedback)  It is just metadata that users add  Key – social mechanism for seeing other tags

5. 5 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  Quality – “compare favorably with professional”?  Relevance – SME generated, close to content – User’s own terms

6. 6 Advantages of Folksonomies  Aboutness – qualitative judgments – Reflect user’s perspective  Multiple dimensions – “communities” of like minded taggers  Support serendipitous form of browsing  Easy to tag any object – photo, document, bookmark  Better than no tags at all

7. 7 Disadvantages of Folksonomies  They don’t work very well – polysemy, synonyms, etc. – Focus on easy tagging, not finding  Compare favorably with no tags, not controlled vocabularies  No structure, no conceptual relationships – Flats lists do not a onomy make  Jargon – SME’s talking to themselves or each other – Multiple communities – different terms  SME’s are not info professional – different skill  Based on popularity only, no quality control

8. 8 Disadvantages of Folksonomies  Issues of scale – popular tags already showing 10,000’s 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 (Power law distribution)  Errors – misspellings, single words or bad compounds, single use or idiosyncratic use  Wikipedia article – very shallow, “wrong”? – not a taxonomy at all

9. 9 Complexity Theory (abridged) History  An interdisciplinary method – Applied to math, model systems, economics, ecology, etc.  Initial Hype Period – 1980’s-1990’s – Chaos theory, Catastrophe theory, AI, etc.  Current – half way between hype and practical – Beware articles that focus on one aspect – self-organizing  Santa Fe Institute, social research, our Keynote  The Center for Complex Systems Research

10. 10 Complexity Theory (abridged) Examples  Complex Systems (not complicated) – Large number of independent relatively dumb elements interact according to a small set of rules. – Self-organizing – order emerges – Local rules, local interactions – global order emerges  Definition by Example – Ant Colonies – clear tunnels with no idea of how to clear a tunnel – Neighborhoods – create a structure with no central planning

11. 11 Complexity Theory (abridged) Essential Features  Large numbers of elements  Local Interactions  Emergence – global from local  Feedback  Self-organization – Key idea – often over-hyped  Importance of the environment – Often overlooked

12. 12 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies Intelligent Design – Universe of Discourse  Complexity – need right level of structure and disorder  No evolution without: – Initial complex structure – Evolutionary mechanisms – feedback with consequences  Level of structure = value of order that emerges – Color clumps, ants, neighborhood stores  Need to pay attention to initial organization structures – - “taxonomies” and metadata – Communities – users and designers

13. 13 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies Designing the world  Wikipedia – fast cheap encyclopedia – Not really just mass of workers making local decisions – Role of initial environment and sets of rules – Feedback everywhere - including on structure and rules – Still have designers – administrators, councils of administrators  Editor Team – like Wikipedia – Create the structured environment – Create the rules and feedback system – Tweak the evolution of the system – Analyze data, paths to monitor – Develop initial candidates – interviews, search log analysis, ethnographic studies

14. 14 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies: Two domains – Internet and Internal – Intranet, databases  Internet – this is the normal domain for folksonomies – More content, more users/taggers – Wilder environment – Less specific targets – web sites, topical articles – Large general sites best, not specialty sites  Internal – More initial structure, more similar content – More resources for tagging – More rewards for categorization – Need authority – corporate policy – More precise targets

15. 15 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies: Two domains of evolution  Structure of the folksonomies – Bottom up – create clusters – based on co-occuring terms, other, groups of people? – Social – have people categorize the tags and then have people rank the appropriateness of categories – One possibility – community based agreement – more people rank a category as good – they become a community  Appropriate tags on documents – Social - Wikipedia style – everyone can tag any document Include evolutionary rank for taggers – Everyone can rank the appropriateness of tags – Develop rank of taggers – super-editors, editors, authors

16. 16 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies: Evolutionary Mechanisms  Feedback with Consequences – If an ant fails to follow a rule, it dies – Set up minimum number of good category or good tag ranks by everyone – if below, it dies. – Death of tag/category – deleted or moved to unranked primordial goo  Filter to top – popularity, Tag Clouds – Del.ici.ous – Very high level – “Blog, photography”  Mutation – keywords into other categories, categories into other categories – Success within a category – popularity, other criteria

17. 17 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies Evolutionary Mechanisms  Ranking Methods – Explicit – people rank directly (roles) Categories, tags, taggers Good tags, best bets for terms or categories? – Implicit – software evaluation, reverse relevance  Who will rank? – Interested people, folksonomy advocates – Intranet – rewarded employees – Internet – community sites, aggregators, search engines  What will we call them? – Force of Nature, Deities, Intelligent Designers

18. 18 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies Scenario One: Del.icio.us Plus  Social tags – only real criteria is popularity – Tag Cloud  Evolve quality of tags and emerging structure of tags – Preferred term = popular (Blog/blogs – Books/book)  Add broad general taxonomy of most popular tags – Tags as natural categories – build up and down  Add mechanisms – rank tags, taggers, categories  Flickr – facets are natural structure – date, people, events  Start – evolve a simple 2 level taxonomy – People assign tags to a category, build numbers – Evolutionary phase shift – spasm of structure

19. 19 Popularity Structure of Folksonomy Good, Bad, and Natural

20. 20 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies Scenario Two – Intranet/Content Aggregators  Buy/Build starter taxonomies – more structure than Del.icio.us  Create a team of designers/rules/mechanisms  Develop reward structures  Feedback – about tags – from employees or customers  Feedback about taggers, categories – from central team with input from selected SME’s.  Add evolution to best bets – compete with management selected

21. 21 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies Research and Theory  Research Ideas – Uncover the effects of “interwingledness” Monitor how people tag (and categorize) – historical patterns Who would do this? Institute? Flickr? Other commercial? Design new metrics and reports? – Discover natural category levels Take terms as candidates for natural level Build structure up and down Apply communities – different natural levels Simplicity – expose taxonomy at natural level - keywords

22. 22 Conclusions: Evolutionary Model  Need to design a complex system, not complicated or free form  Different design for four domains: Internet-Internal, Categories-Tags  Advanced feedback is necessary  Editor Function is necessary – Develop infrastructure, analyze feedback, facilitate  Order is grown – from a combination of bottom up and design  Management is suggesting rules and testing and gathering feedback about usefulness, not dictating correct terms

23. 23 Complexity Theory and Folksonomies Benefits  Add the onomy to folk – More structure at low cost  Benefits of research – Investigation itself yields ideas  Internal Domain – supplemented by traditional methods, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies  If it fails, at least could kill the term, foksonomy (It’s metadata)

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