Towards better understanding of folksonomic patterns

A pragmatic experiment is presented that analyzes folksonomies using three classification categories: Personal, Factual and Subjective, in order to gain more understanding of the types of tags used in the social tagging process.

Abstract

Folksonomies provide a free source of keywords describing web resources; however, these keywords are free form and their semantics spans multiple contextual dimension. In this paper, we present a pragmatic experiment that analyzes folksonomies using three classification categories: Personal, Factual and Subjective, in order to gain more understanding of the types of tags used in the social tagging process. The rational for this work was to measure the potential portion of folksonomy tags that might be helpful when considering the creation of structured metadata.