Folksonomy - Taxonomy for the People

Folksonomy is a neologism (newly coined word) for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace. This feature has begun appearing in a variety of social software. At present, the best examples of online folksonomies are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing site, and Flickr, for photo sharing. Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of tags, but it is not a folksonomy because users cannot share their categorizations. Folksonomy is related to the concept of faceted classification from library science where a system allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, allowing searching and browsing of related information through several classes. Elements may include subject, geographical, temporal and form of an item.

Here are some links:

• Clay Shirky on folksonomy


• Vanderwal on folksonomy


• Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?


• Flickr and "folksonomies"


• Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification
  and Communication Through Shared Metadata by Adam Mathes