Sunday, November 30, 2008

Controlled Vocabulary in Folksonomies

Editorial - Folksonomies: Why do we need controlled vocabulary? by Alireza Noruzi , Webology (June 2007)

Answers the question "what can a thesaurus do for a folksonomy-based system?" Also makes clear how the folksonomy differs from a classification system.

"Folksonomy is a bottom-up approach where users themselves join the classification, compared to top-down taxonomy and library classifications. By this nature, folksonomy classification can reflect users' actual interest in real time (Niwa et al., 2006). In contrast to hierarchical library classifications (e.g., DDC or LCC) and thesauri, there is usually no limit for choice of tags in folksonomy; so many similar tags are generated. "

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