The value of both a folksonomy and taxonomy.

Folksonomies and taxonomies have their uses in classifying of information. Sites like Delicious, Flickr, Facebook and Technorati do this to enable users to interesting content. Both of Folksonomies and Taxonomies have their place but with the online worlds merging and becoming more of a social interactive space can features of both be incorporated in to Web 3.0?

Let's look at the differnces between Folksonomies and Taxonomies:

Folksonomies Pros and Cons:

1. Pros

a) Folksonomies support serindiptius finding in a community.

b) Anyone can contribute to a folksonomy in a social networking community.

c) Doens't require a specialist knowledge the subject area to construct and add terms via tagging.

d) Based on key words created by publisher and user creating a bottom up indexing heirachy.

e) Many can index - crowd sourcing.

f) Fast at updating and capturing new terms.

2. Cons

a) Don't support searching like structured taxonomies created by information professionals.

b) Have a narrow flat structure of terms.

c) As the community grows more generalist tags will make content harder to find. As humans are are lazy it is doubltful that they will go back and retag thier collections to enable browsing on a more effecient basis.

Taxonimies Pros and Cons:

1. Pros

a) Allows the user to search a wide variety of terms including narrower and broarder catagories.

b) Vastly improves the searching capability of a database.

c) Based on a controlled terms created by editorial committee.

2. Cons

a) Requires revisioning and maintenance other wise the thesauri's vocabulary in the taxonomy becomes stale and useless aid to searching.

b) Doesn't allow creators or users to add terms to the thesauri of the taxonomy.

c) Requires people to have a knowledge of the subject they researching.

d) A few people decide on the terms in the thesauri and only trained people can use it.

e) Slow at adding new terms.

So you ask what value is a user generated folksonomy offer in comparisson to a specially created taxonomy by a trained professional?

Well with a folksonomie anyone can do it. You decide how to discribe your content that has been uploaded on to a social networking site. The site can harness the power of crowd sourcing to and offer suggestions to you as you tag thus creating a guided tagging system. Whether your site does this is depends on it's purpose for organising content and how it is shared. New terms to discribe contemporary social phenomena can be added instantly keeping your folksonomy upto date with very little effort. A folksonomy may aid in a community browsing for content but will not allow for specific searching terms as a controlled vocabulary thesaus would in a taxonomy. That's where a folksonomie falls down - a folksonomy is only as good as it's tags. The more generalist the tags are in a large site the less relevant content will be found when a user is specifically searching for a photo, post or podcast.

I just thought I would mention one caviet here:

There is a link between both a Folksonomy and Taxonomy. It's not obvious at first but over time both will have problems with terms becoming out moded due to changes in language use in contemporary culture. So unless each regularly revises and updates it term structure and globally re-indexes it's content the ability to retrieve older content reliably will decrease.

Any comments?