Folksonomy again!

Since the article I was reading this week on Folksonomy was fairly long, I was finding a lot of interesting insights in it, and due to overall length of my post, I decided to use this final post for the week to spend a little more time with Folksonomy, particularly in light of the article AN APPROACH TO FOLKSONOMY-BASED ONTOLOGY MAINTENANCE FOR LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS. AS I mentioned in my last post, in this article the authors are seeking to find ways to improve on folksonomy as an educational tool, focusing on providing initial scaffolding for the tagging system and a better visual layout to help with user interaction and understanding of that system. 

An important addition to these ideas is that the authors also sought out a method for students to use external content following their preferred terminology for organization of the data. This provides greater flexibility to students, but I wonder if it could also bring back in some of the disorganization that this method of categorization was meant to solve. Since this class is specifically focused on Web2.0 it is also important to note the role of student created content in the overall folksonomy. 

Of course, in the face of potential disorganization the authors propose a system of ontology maintenance through an intuitive system. Interestingly, this system includes a color coding to the tags themselves so that people can come to a better understanding of the relatedness of the tags. For instance, a darker color indicates a closer relationship, helping students easily pick out close connections in the data. Another great feature they added was by showing connections based on a hierarchy of ideas. In other words, having families of semantic connections demonstrated by lines in the visuals. 

In conclusion most of the participants found the ontological tagging system to be helpful and provided a great visualization of the connections between items.