Carving Up The World

Both Folksonomy and Taxonomy were a heavy part of our discussion in the leture and tutorials this week. Both are methods used to categorize content online although they differ quite a bit in the way they do it.

Taxonomy is the process of categorising content into a hierarchical structure. Content is arranged into lists of genres and sub-genres, it can be quite useful if you know exactly what you're looking for, and quite the opposite if you don't. A weakness of Taxonomy is that something can only appear in one area, despite it possibly coming under multiple categories. For example, a book may both be about war, and science fiction, but under a hierarchical structure the most fitting place must be chosen, it can't be in two places.

Example of Taxonomy

Folksonomy is the practice of categorising content through the use of tagging. The process is mostly user generated, with people attributing tags they feel are relevant to the content. When a search is conducted, everything that has been tagged with the word that was searched for will come up as a result. The advantage of tags is that content can now really be in multiple places. That book can really be under both science fiction and war, making it a far more flexible and informal method the organise data.

Example of Folksonomy

Folksonomy seems to be taking over Taxonomy as the prominent method of categorising data online, simply because its more flexible and relies on the opinions of many as opposed to the judgements of an individual.