| Also known as social tagging or collaborative tagging, folksonomy is a user-generated classification system in which people collectively create and manage tags in order to annotate and categorize online information.
The term was coined in 2004 by information architect and Internet developer Thomas Vander Wal and is a blending of the words ‘folks’ and ‘taxonomy’.
One of the characteristics of this practice is that users are allowed to associate freely-chosen keywords to any type of online content, e.g. videos, text, images, bookmarks. Two of the best known examples of this innovative way to map meaning are the photo management and sharing tool Flickr and the social bookmarking tool Delicious.
In this distributed and collaborative grassroots approach the most popular keywords get more visibility, emerging through bottom-up consensus, and all the individual tags can constitute a wealth of metadata about digital material that will be useful to the whole online community of users. [1] See also: Bookmark, Metadata, Social Media, Tagging,Web 2.0 |
Folksonomy
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