You were introduced to the advantages of using controlled vocabularies in the previous pages. This page will look at a different way of assigning terms to resources, such as using folksonomies.

Folksonomy is a neologism coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004 from the words folk and taxonomy. For Wal, folksonomy is the result of freely and personally assigning tags to text or objects for the purpose of retrieval. Tags are assigned in a social, shared and open environment.

Using tags for subject indexing is widespread (e.g. Flickr, YouTube, Instagram), but it should be stressed that it doesn't offer the advantages of a controlled vocabulary. It allows using terms from the current vocabulary, sometimes more up-to-date than some KOS terms, which can be an advantage. However, subject information retrieval has the same flaws as natural language.

For a video introduction to social tagging as an approach to knowledge organisation, please watch a recording of Pauline Rafferty below.
Pauline Rafferty is a Senior Lecturer at Aberystwyth University, where she teaches knowledge organisation and representation, knowledge and information architectures, and qualitative research methods.

The video "Social tagging as knowledge organisation" was recorded in March 2023 and is 10:40 minutes long.
You will find the following topics in this video: what is social tagging (from 0:36), advantages and disadvantages of using folksonomies (1:24), examples of participatory work (7:43), and finally, a recommendation of a paper to discuss caution vs optimism in using social tagging (8:55).