Folksonomies : power to the people

Abstract

In recent times, an unprecedented amount of Web content has begunto be generated through web logs, wikis and other social tools thanksto lower technology and cost barriers. A new host of content creatorsis emerging, often individuals with the will to participate in discussionsand share their ideas with like-minded people. This is to say thatthis increasing amount of varied, valuable content is generated bynon-trained, non-expert information professionals: they are at thesame time users and producers of information. We have gone past acritical mass of connectivity between people that has introduceda new revolutionary ability to communicate, collaborate and sharegoods online. To respond to these increased informational and exchangeneeds, new communication models are emerging and producing an incredibleamount of distributed information that information management professionals,information architects, librarians and knowledge workers at largeneed to link, aggregate, and organize in order to extract knowledge.The issue is whether the traditional organizational schemes usedso far are suitable to address the classification needs of fast-proliferating,new information sources or if, to achieve this goal, better aggregationand concept matching tools are required. Folksonomies attempt toprovide a solution to this issue, by introducing an innovative distributedapproach based on social classification.