Ang.Crilley

Taxonomy and folksonomy were discussed in week 6’s lecture and tutorials. Although both are methods of categorising things (in an online sense), each way differs and can be a better or worse was of categorisation, depending on the user and what they’re searching for.

Taxonomy is the process of categorising or classifying something hierarchically. It is an exclusive search, and pieces of information are easily accessible if the user knows specifically what they’re searching for. It ususally consists of lists of headings, upon which are divided into subheadings, and then these are divided again into subheadings, and again and again and so forth. The process can be quite tedious if the user is conducting a broad search or is uncertain which category their desired content would be under. Libraries are an example of taxonomical classification, as a book may appear under multiple searches back is physically in only one spot. The picture below is an example of taxonomical structure – as you can see how from one category it has been continually subdivided to reach a single ’species’.

Folksonomy is the process of categorising something thru collaborative ‘tagging’. Tags are words that people apply to pieces of information so that when other users search this word, everything that has been ‘tagged’ with that word should come up. Folksonomy allows the public to read/see/view an article, and apply multiple tags to it. This makes a much broader search, as things can be tagged as any topic, even conflicting tags such as ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’ can be applied to the same piece of information. It is a less formal method of categorisation, and has its downfall when people associate articles with irrelevant tags and things completely unrelated to what the user actually wanted to appear. The title ‘folksonomy’ was derived from the fact that the ‘folk’ are the ones who classify pieces, not the experts who most of the time general people can’t relate to or don’t understand the technical tags they may apply to something. Folksonomy redistributes the work to dozens, hundreds or thousands of users instead of centralising everything to what one person thinks. Below is an image of a folksonomic structure of someones flickr account – these are all the ‘tags’ associated with all the images, the larger words being tags used more frequently.

The main difference between taxonomy and folksonomy is that taxonomy is often classification, or associated with a certain category from the perspective of one person. Folksonomy allows any individual or user to tag an article, piece of information, picture, etc, with any description they see fit and which appropriately can be associated with it. Whilst they both has positives and negatives, folksonomy seems to be taking over search techniques – especially with the internet – relying instead on the work of multiple users opinion as opposed to individual.