Folksonomy and controlled vocabulary in LibraryThing

Introduction “Folksonomy” is a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal from “folk” and “taxonomy” (Smith, 2004) to describe systems in which people (not professional indexers) assign natural language descriptors to resources. Many definitions of varying precision and breadth have been used for “folksonomy” (Vander Wal, 2005), and a variety of similar terms have been proposed (Merholz, 2005), but the term folksonomy appears to have become the most accepted. Because of the echo of “taxonomy”, folksonomy is often incorrectly described as classification, but it is actually more correctly labeled categorization or indexing (Mathes, 2004). Folksonomies appear in many current web applications, most famously in the “social bookmarking” service del.icio.us, in which users bookmark and tag web pages, and the photo sharing site flickr, where users can upload and tag photographs and other images.