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Beneath the Metadata - Replies
I have read the "Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy in the November 2006 DLib. Boy, did I have problems with it, but so did David Weinberger, who responded with Beneath the Metadata - a reply.
My reading of the DLib article brought back the pain of taxonomies and the "expert" arrogance that occasionally accompanies taxonomies. I have worked in many enterprise organizations who have gone down the taxonomy route and had decent results. Taxonomies are essential parts of building information management tools. But taxonomies are never done, they are not easily emergent, they are incredibly resource intensive (they need a lot of money and people to build them and maintain them), and they don't work for everybody (sometimes large portions of the people who use the information system can not find or refind information they want or need using the taxonomy). When we would survey the people using our intranet or the internet application, one of the top responses was things were difficult to find as they were not called what they expected them to be called. This can be before or after a few hundred thousand dollars were spent building a taxonomy.
This assumption that the author of the "Beneath the Metadata" makes that taxonomies are great and help people find things by providing the authoritative terms is wrong. Taxonomies are always less than perfect and most often far less than perfect for helping people find and refind information they need. But, we do need taxonomies to provide that foundation structure. We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy.
What should fill the gap for the failures of taxonomy? Yes, folksonomy should provide the emergent terms. The folksonomy identifies the many gaps in a taxonomy. The folksonomy provides the terms that can fill the gaps. The taxonomist/ontologist has the job of sorting out how to add the terms to their corpus (hierarchy, thesaurus, etc.). The folksonomy can even sit side-by-side with a taxonomy as the folksonomy is built from real people placing terms that they call things and their context on items they want to hold on to. It is their hooks for finding and refinding information. Tags should never be removed as that breaks a person's ability to find and refind that object. At the core of what a taxonomist does is aid the finding and refinding of information, thus removing a tag is breaking people's ability to do that, which means the taxonomist is flat out failing at their job.
The taxonomy and folksonomy are co-dependent. The two tools need each other. The both have strong proven advantages and they both have their faults. But the brilliant thing is they each strength provides cover for the other's detractors. The sooner the "experts" understand this the better off real people will be in finding information they want and need, as well as refinding that information.
November 20, 2006 in Folksonomy | Permalink
Comments
"Taxonomies are always less than perfect and most often far less than perfect for helping people find and refind information they need."
Exactly! This is the incorrect underlying assumption in Peterson's argument...there *is* no system that gives right answers all the time. (and be suspicious if one claims to)
The best a taxonomy can do is to make the many seem like the few by organizing information to be conceptually simpler...and that's no small thing. They're very valuable...but we can't take their authority for granted, ever.
Also, I would add to your argument by saying that different people have different strategies for finding/refinding stuff. Nobody does it in the same way, and therefore multiple systems might suit multiple people. Some people might like taxonomies better...so give them that. I, personally, really like folksonomies, so give me that. It's just software at this point...we can provide both rather easily.
Posted by: Joshua Porter at Nov 20, 2006 11:57:21 AM
I rarely dip into this debate in public but I'd like to offer a whole-hearted endorsement of the last two paragraphs in your entry.
Since this debate cropped up, I have been a bit bewildered about why people insist on pitting these different methodologies as adversaries. Pragmatic and contextual uses of, both, "well-designed" categorizations and emergent social categories seems quite promising.
The energy surrounding these debates should occur at the messier ground-level: deciding when and how to adjust pre-existing taxonomies with emergent terms/categories and deciding when emergent terms/categories should not cause these adjustments.
I have written about these kinds of activities here.
Let's face it -- even before the advent of the term "folksonomy" and social tagging tools, we undertook activities that were folksonomic.
A librarian might have suggested a new section in the library where materials that have been in demand are centralize and then used a popular, colloquial term to identify them.
A zoo's layout is designed according to people's expectations of how animals should be grouped rather than on strict zoological taxonomies. Lions and Tigers and Bears...oh my.
Search term log files have been mined to identify terms that are not represented in a web site's categorization scheme. These terms then drive the decision to adjust the site's structure and terminology...and so on.
As is often the case with intellectual debates, people tend to draw opposing poles when there is plenty of overlap available.
Posted by: Eric at Nov 20, 2006 12:30:48 PM
After reading the response here, as well Elaine's article and Dave's response I just had to on my blog.
It seems to me that this is kind of a stale debate. Both sides just try to disprove the other at some point.
Elaine's starting point was not a correct one since she failed to ask the one question that provide a clear distinction between Folksonomies and Taxonomies:
What are we trying to do? Are we trying to catalog things for the sake of cataloging or are we trying to tag things for easier access.
Posted by: Eran Sandler at Nov 23, 2006 10:06:53 AM
Thomas,
Have you seen any companies successfully implement controlled taxonomies and folksonomies side-by-side for their web site or web application?
Posted by: Rob Fay at Nov 29, 2006 11:19:49 AM
Folksonomies feel like a quick and crude solution to the information overload we are facing on the web. Also they are good enough to meet users expectations of 'search' which are currently based on their experience of general search engines. A taxonomy (or ontology, or topic map, or semantic wordnet) can provide a much richer search experience and when people talk about 'control' or 'constraint' or 'subjectivity' it shows that when it comes to more formal systems they have only ever heard of the Dewey classification system...
Posted by: Keely Flint at Dec 8, 2006 10:43:43 AM
Keely, there is an incredible amount of terms and their connections that are left out of taxonomies and controlled systems. The do have a great value, but they have well known deficiencies (emergence, exhaustive, resource expensive, etc.). Folksonomy and taxonomy are an excellent pairing to fill in the deficiencies of the other.
Posted by: vanderwal at Dec 8, 2006 11:54:33 AM
Hi I normally don't post into blogs like this but I need help with Taxonomy. I am a recruiter who has a nice job for someone in taxonomy. They would need to be able to develop the taxonomy and implement it across a large corporation that currently has nothing in place. If any one can point me in direction as to where I could find such a person I would be very grateful. Thanks for your help
Greg
Posted by: Greg McLean at Jan 12, 2007 11:49:41 AM
Why don't we use topic maps more often to address this issue?
My world view doesn't equal your world view, which is the root problem with any method of information creation, classification and discovery.
Rather than going, "oh taxonomies are so horrible", why not allow a plethora of ways of describing something, using taxonomies, folk taxonomies and folksonomies, and use a topic map, so that we can have our cake and eat it too!
M
Posted by: Matthew Hodgson at Jan 31, 2007 7:27:00 PM
Bigstockphoto is an example of a combination of taxonomy and folksonomy.
I don't know how well it works for the users, but it looks good.
At quomon.com we have gone the folksonomy way completely but we're discussing implementing some kind of at least highest-level management of tags/categories, or perhaps even combining a formal hierarchy of categories with the informal tags.
anybody know other examples of a combination?
Posted by: David Givoni at Apr 11, 2007 11:51:44 PM
