Approaching Folksonomy

Since it is one of the key themes for the week, I thought I should take the chance in my second reading for the week to dive into Folksonomy a little bit. This is a new term for me and not one that I was previously familiar with so I was excited to get started with it. I decided to read  An Approach to Folksonomy-Based Ontology Maintenance for Learning Environments to get started.

I have to admit that the language used initially seems very daunting. Ontology enhanced learning environments, measuring semantic relatedness, and software architecture are not the types of phrases that I normally throw around on a day to day basis. Although it seems to me upon initial glance that all of this really just refers to a sophisticated form of tagging, but I could be wrong.

When viewed from the standpoint of how this system could improve the learning process, however, the authors argue that previous uses of folksonomy have been limited by their conceptions of learning that are based on a tutoring view of learning instead of one that focuses instead on creation. If I am understanding correctly, what sets folksonomy apart from tagging alone is the community aspect to this approach. Of course, this opens up possibilities for collaboration and shared learning across the community but it also could potentially result in disorganized results and and unclear order to the items tagged. In addition, there is the issue that to have an effective system of tagging you need a rather large audience of participants. 

The solution for the authors to the above problems was to create a system of tagging that provides some semantic guidance to the user when tagging, along with a more intuitive interface for visualization of the tagging process. More specifically in their own courses the authors utilized other methods of organization, such as the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS), to provide a starting point to the tagging that was done by students to improve the overall organization.