Participation Literacy

In a posting in the blog Atomiq 2004-09-03, Gene Smith wrote the following:

Last week I asked the AIfIA members’ list what they thought about the social classification happening at Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us. In each of these systems people classify their pictures/bookmarks/web pages with tags (e.g. wedding), and then the most popular tags float to the top (e.g. Flickr’s tags or Del.icio.us on the right).

Thomas Vander Wal, in his reply, coined a great name for these informal social categories: a folksonomy.(Smith, 2004)

This piece of communication was one of the snowballs leading to the Web 2.0 concept. Searching for the word folksonomy in Google returns 5,670,000 hits (2006-04-24).

Every time I search Swedish Google for “folksonomy”, the system asks me if I would rather want to do the search on “folksång” - the Swedish word for “folksong”. Thus the Google glossary in Swedish does not contain the word folksonomy. The word is quite new, attributed to the information architect Thomas Vander Wal, see the quote above. Folksonomy is a combination of ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’. Taxonomy comes from the Greek taxis (classification) and nomos (management). ‘Folk’ comes from the Old English folc, meaning people; so folksonomy means people’s classification management. Features later named folksonomy, probably first appeared in del.icio.us, Flickr and Annotea: “Annotea is a Semantic Web based project for which the inspiration came from users’ collaboration problems in the Web. It examined what users did naturally and selected familiar metaphors for supporting better collaboration” (Koivunen, 2005, p 1). Flickr is a way to store, sort, search and share photos online; del.icio.us is similar but for bookmarks instead of photos.

Folksonomy can be discussed as the opposite of ontology. The Computer Scientist Tom Gruber describes it like this:

Short answer: An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.

The word “ontology” seems to generate a lot of controversy in discussions about AI. It has a long history in philosophy, in which it refers to the subject of existence. It is also often confused with epistemology, which is about knowledge and knowing.

In the context of knowledge sharing, I use the term ontology to mean a specification of a conceptualization. That is, an ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set-of-concept-definitions, but more general. And it is certainly a different sense of the word than its use in philosophy.

What is important is what an ontology is for. My colleagues and I have been designing ontologies for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. In that context, an ontology is a specification used for making ontological commitments. The formal definition of ontological commitment is given below. For pragmatic reasons, we choose to write an ontology as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary. Although this isn’t the only way to specify a conceptualization, it has some nice properties for knowledge sharing among AI software (e.g., semantics independent of reader and context). Practically, an ontological commitment is an agreement to use a vocabulary (i.e., ask queries and make assertions) in a way that is consistent (but not complete) with respect to the theory specified by an ontology. We build agents that commit to ontologies. We design ontologies so we can share knowledge with and among these agents. (Gruber)

One example of an ontology is the Linnaean taxonomy; the system of scientific classification now widely used in the biological sciences. The classification systems used by libraries are also ontologies. They are like hyper structured worlds, where everything fed to the system have a - ideally speaking - predetermined parking space. A librarian who is just about to classify a book has this ontology partly in his/her head, and partly in a written “manual”. Let us say the book, which is going to be classified, is called “My love of Maya”. Maya can stand for one of three things 1) a female name 2) the South American people called Maya 3) the 3D programming software. When the librarian catalogues this book s/he has to determine which of these Maya denotations correspond to the content of the book, and then compare this subject with a “place” in an ontology, such as the library cataloguing system, Dewey Decimal System.

In the information architect community, there is a discourse about folksonomy and ontology, discussing them as opposites:

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by formal terms used in data that they might generate or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social Web. They are created as people associate terms with content that they generate or consume. Recently the two ideas have been put into opposition, as if they were right and left poles of a political spectrum.(Gruber, 2005)

This dualist view is rather extreme. There are merits in both expert classification and social classification – folksonomy. They contextualise information differently. An expert classifies according to rules learned by a long tradition and “folks” classify on personal basis. When many non-experts classify something and this knowledge is reconstructed by a CI Machine, it is often called collective intelligence as outlined in the section above. If all these classifiers were experts, it probably would not be called collective intelligence because all experts are supposed to make the same choices - the right choices.

Folksonomy is practically realised in the form of tags and tag clouds. A tag is a keyword describing an entity of knowledge, such as a photo, a bookmark, a music cd or a book. Tagging is non hierarchical and the tags are not picked from a classification system. Every person who tags a knowledge entity has his or her own classification system, mostly unconscious.

In we see a bundle of tags shaped into a tag cloud. Tag clouds are visual representations of a group of tags, weighted after occurrence. The tag cloud above is a visual representation of the tags for my bookmarks at the Bookmark service Blinklist. The bigger and more two-coloured a word is, the more bookmarks I have created with this particular tag.

In fact, tag clouds are not entirely new phenomena. Traditionally they are known as a weighted list in the field of visual design. What is new is this particular appearance in conjunction with folksonomized Web sites. A tag is comparable to a table of contents; the main difference is that a table of contents is hierarchical, while a tag cloud is flat, non-hierarchical. The display order of the tags is generally alphabetical, thus making it possible to find a tag both by alphabetical order and by its popularity. Clicking on a tag will generally lead to a collection of items marked with this tag. The items might be bookmarks as at Delicious or Blinklist, or pictures as at Flickr.

One of the obvious problems with folksonomy is the lack of synonym control. The word Web 2.0 can for example be tagged as: web20, web2.0, web_20 and so on. The collective might handle this automatically within time, as people start to examine how other people have tagged a piece of information. But even if this problem cannot be dealt with I think it is working quite well. I doubt, though, that a solution can include some kind of influence from experts. Folksonomy is an important part of Web 2.0 and will probably be included in more official systems within time, together with expert ontologies. Folksonomy and ontology will together create important arenas for describing and discussing knowledge.