Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Folksonomy and Taxonomy – do you have to choose?

With the introduction of SharePoint 2010 and the way that it supports free tagging (folksonomy) as well as a centrally managed controlled vocabulary (taxonomy) using the managed metadata column – the debate about taxonomy versus folksonomy will probably light up again. In my personal opinion – there is no need to choose between one of both. The way that SharePoint 2010 supports the notion of promoting free tags into a managed taxonomy demonstrates that a folksonomy can be used as a source to define a taxonomy as well.

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2 comments:

  1. I totally agree that there is no need to choose between both.

    It is however essential that coherence and ease-of-use are central to such a hybrid approach. Not sure how well SharePoint deals with this aspect.

    E.g. Knowledge Plaza implements such a hybrid tagging mechanism (faceted tagging with both upfront dictionary constraints and downhill gardening tools)and it works like a charm.

    Cheers,
    Greg
    http://www.knowledgeplaza.co.uk

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  2. I don't think you should choose but to use both, but there should be statistics where you could promote folksonomy terms to the taxonomy.

    I haven't found any such monetoring tools yet. Are they out there?

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