Folksonomy with practical taxonomy, a design for social metadata of the virtual museum of the Pacific

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a Digital Ecosystem that engages members of several communities, each with their own ontological relationships with the Pacific Collection of the Australian Museum. The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is intended to support on-line community interaction using social-media technologies to extend the annotation of objects to suit the stakeholder’s own needs. The success of the system depends on leveraging the diffusion of language and encouraging a conversation between on-line communities. In this paper we explore the relationships between stakeholders, folksonomy and taxonomy, to reveal the design forces on our digital ecosystem. Our analysis defines the scope for the social tagging component that progresses the design of our data model and gives us some confidence that we are capturing the right data for the system’s development into the future.