Saturday, October 25, 2008

ICKM 2008 - Integrating Folksonomies into cultural heritage digital collections: the challenges and opportunities of Web 2.0

The speaker was Daniel Gelaw Alemneh of the University of Texas.


Daniel spent time defining Folksonomy and the advantages and disadvantages of Folksonomy. I've asked Daniel for his slides, and will incorporate his points if / when he sends them to me.


The question Daniel wanted to explore was "How do we work to bring together Folksonomy and taxonomy?" The concern of the classic taxonomist is that the weaknesses of Folksonomy will infect our taxonomies.



There are examples of libraries that have embraced Folksonomy, such as the PennTags system at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a library tagging system. Another example is the MBooks Collection builder, the University of Michigan's interface to allow students to create their own collections of books.



Commercial examples are Bibliocommons, a social discovery system for libraries and CiteUlike a social bookmarking site for academic system.


If we have these examples, can we be inspired by their work to better integrate folksonomies in our taxonomies?



We should also look at external tools that exploit the structure of the Folksonomy - FolkRank: a ranking algorithm for folksonomies.

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