Monday, January 10, 2005
Many-to-Many: folksonomies controlled vocabularies
", and speculation about what might happen if they are paired with controlled vocabularies.
�it�s easy to say that the social networkers have figured out what the librarians haven�t: a way to make metadata work in widely distributed and heretofore disconnected content collections.
Easy, but wrong: folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don�t support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals. Folksonomies aren�t likely to organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters. They�re highly unlikely to develop beyond flat lists and accrue the broader and narrower term relationships that we see in thesauri."
�it�s easy to say that the social networkers have figured out what the librarians haven�t: a way to make metadata work in widely distributed and heretofore disconnected content collections.
Easy, but wrong: folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don�t support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals. Folksonomies aren�t likely to organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters. They�re highly unlikely to develop beyond flat lists and accrue the broader and narrower term relationships that we see in thesauri."
