While many of our readers may be familiar with the terms, Vocabulary & Taxonomy, they may not know what a #Folksonomy is. Allow us to explain how it differs from a standard taxonomy and why we are creating a “folksonomy”.

According to Wikipedia,

“The term was coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004^[5][6][7] as a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy. Folksonomies became popular as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation that enable users to collectively classify and find information via shared tags. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.^[8]

Folksonomies can be used for K-12 education, business, and higher education. More specifically, folksonomies may be implemented for social bookmarking, teacher resource repositories, e-learning systems, collaborative learning, collaborative research, and professional development.”

Examples:

“Delicious^[2] (stylized del.icio.us) was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.”

Another example of a Folksonomy is found on the web at a domain named Folksonomy. Click here to see an example of an arrangement of a tag cloud that create a folkonomy with the most popular tags being the largest and boldest.  Click on the tag– Canada — to see what information is listed under this tag!

 

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