Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?

The main casualties are usually enumerated as follows: Misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray) Badly encoded tags, such as unlikely compound word groupings (e.g.,TimBernersLee) Tags that do not follow convention in issues such as case and number; singular versus plural form (e.g., apple, apples) Personal tags that are without meaning to the wider community (e.g., mydog) Single-use tags that appear only once in the database. (e.g., billybobsdog)

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adding synonyms

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In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

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In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

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At the moment, although there are no standard guidelines on good tag selection practices, those in the folksonomy community have offered many ideas. Ways in which tags may be improved are presented frequently on blogs and folksonomy discussion sites. In his article on tag literacy, Ulises Ali Mejias suggests a number of tag selection "best practices" [14]. These include:

• using plurals rather than singulars
• using lower case,
• grouping words using an underscore,
• following tag conventions started by others and
• adding synonyms.

Other recommendations from Mejas and others working in this area are that users try to "think specific and general at the same time" and that personal tags are fine as long as more generic tags are also used. The consensus among those in the folksonomy community is that extra tags are always better. Many folksonomies allow users to modify their tags, and there is considerable scope for users to tidy up the entries that they have already created.

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Even assuming that such a consensus were possible, do we really want a world where everyone speaks a collaboratively defined analogue to the Queen's English? To what extent, in this instance, with a fantastically complex and valuable database of user contributions from all over the world, is it possible to separate the metaphorical baby from the bathwater?

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possibly the real problem with folksonomies in not their chaotic tags but that they are trying to serve two masters at once; the personal collection, and the collective collection

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Popularity of tags decreases very rapidly, the resultant curve falling asymptotically towards y=1, in a characteristic shape (see Figure 1).

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1. Introduction

A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. A general review of social bookmarking tools, one popular use area of folksonomies, was given in the April edition of D-Lib [1]. In the article the authors elaborate on the approach taken by social classification systems and the motivators behind tagging. They write, "...tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc.... Rather, they are a supplemental means to organise information and order search results."

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

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A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined.

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what makes folksonomies work

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Optimisation of user tag input, to improve their quality for the purposes of later reuse as searchable keywords, would increase the perceived value of the folksonomic tag approach.

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So what exactly are tags? A simple definition would be to say that tags are keywords, category names, or metadata. In essence, a tag is simply a freely chosen set of textual keywords. However, because tags are not created by information specialists, they do not at present follow any ubiquitous formal guidelines. This means that items can be categorised with any word that defines a relationship between the online resource and a concept in the user's mind. Any number of words might be chosen, some of which are obvious representations, others making less sense outside the tag author's context.

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Improving Tag Literacy

Given that there is already a movement towards convergence of tags, how can we foster this trend? At the moment there are two key ways in which the metadata created in folksonomies could be improved to aid searching:

• Educating users to add "better" tags
• Improving the systems to allow "better" tags to be added

Educating users

Currently most users don't give much thought to the way they tag resources, and bad or "sloppy" tags are ten-a-penny in folksonomies. The main casualties are usually enumerated as follows:

• Misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray)
• Badly encoded tags, such as unlikely compound word groupings (e.g.,TimBernersLee)
• Tags that do not follow convention in issues such as case and number; singular versus plural form (e.g., apple, apples)
• Personal tags that are without meaning to the wider community (e.g., mydog)
• Single-use tags that appear only once in the database. (e.g., billybobsdog)

In order for folksonomies to offer much more in the way of social value, many feel that tag creation needs to becomes a lot more proficient; but are the problems really those described above?

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Methods for improving tags

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t the moment, although there are no standard guidelines on good tag selection practices, those in the folksonomy community have offered many ideas. Ways in which tags may be improved are presented frequently on blogs and folksonomy discussion sites. In his article on tag literacy, Ulises Ali Mejias suggests a number of tag selection "best practices" [14]. These include:

• using plurals rather than singulars
• using lower case,
• grouping words using an underscore,
• following tag conventions started by others and
• adding synonyms.

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Methods for improving tags

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To succeed, attempting to improve tag literacy (or tag etiquette) in the folksonomy world involves two processes. Firstly, the community needs to be ready to set rules and agree upon a set of standards for tags. Secondly, users need to be made aware of and agree to follow these rules.

At the moment, although there are no standard guidelines on good tag selection practices, those in the folksonomy community have offered many ideas. Ways in which tags may be improved are presented frequently on blogs and folksonomy discussion sites. In his article on tag literacy, Ulises Ali Mejias suggests a number of tag selection "best practices" [14]. These include:

• using plurals rather than singulars
• using lower case,
• grouping words using an underscore,
• following tag conventions started by others and
• adding synonyms.

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Folksonomies are popularly related to the anthropological study of "folk taxonomies", a favoured study of cognitive anthropologists in the 1960s, but the significance of this snippet of information is often eclipsed by today's perception of folksonomies as a popular mechanism for creating user-populated search databases. Briefly revisiting the origins of the term is useful, if only to situate the discussions presented here with respect to their antecedents.

A folk taxonomy is most easily defined by contrast to a scientific taxonomy, a naming system to be applied objectively, independently of social matters. Scientific taxonomies, such as the Linnaean taxonomic system, are to be applied independently of personal feeling on the matter. The emergence of the "folk taxonomy" recognised common names as worthy of mention, serving useful functions within a social and cultural context, and the study of folk taxonomies remained popular for some time. However, few generalisable results were extracted from this work, and the work tended to focus on artificially simplified and often trivial semantic domains [20]. It was eventually re-framed as a stage in the study of knowledge structures, consensus and understanding within groups.

Later work from a number of domains provides some insight into the problem domain, but the field is complex, encompassing culture, language and thought. On some details agreement has been reached; people do appear to think in terms of domains [21], and dialect is an indicator of social class, educational level and age.

The subset of a language used in a certain setting (the situated nature of vocabulary choice and manner of speech) is both fascinating and confounding. In internet terms, this is most commonly encountered in the form of "speech communities", groups of people who share a certain set of vocabulary or jargon.

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