One of the biggest challenges faced by most organizations is organizing, finding, and marking information in the knowledge repository in such a way that it is easily accessible as and when needed by the employees. The classical approach used widely is indexing documents to help users in deciding documents relevancy and retrieval. Classical methods comprise classification systems (taxonomies), thesaurus, and controlled keywords (nomenclatures) [Aitchison et al. 2004; Cleveland and Cleveland 2001; Lancaster 2003; Stock and Stock 2008].

Folksonomy is a most recent knowledge management (km) tool of web 2.0 for searching, accessing, and labelling information by the content creator and the user in a way that makes sense to them. Folksonomies include novel social dimensions of tagging [Mathes 2004; Smith 2004]. It is a new model for content indexing based on collaborative tagging with user generated keywords that broaden the spectrum of knowledge interpretation methods. Folksonomy is a valuable addition to the traditional KM methodologies since it facilitates tagging input from the end user, promote the use of active language, and most importantly allows community navigation of an organization’s knowledge base in new ways.

With the introduction of folksonomy end user is no more a passive user but an active contributor to the indexing and retrieval of content. These tags are written in common language rather than the pre-conceived formal list based on the user’s understanding of the content. The tags created by the end-users are searchable for everyone beside the interpreter-created controlled terms and the author-created text words and references (Stock, 2007). Keywords are no longer keywords now, but tags and the collection of tags used to classify content on any different platform forms a Folksonomy. This makes the content scalable and easy to find and use.

The purpose of knowledge management is to encourage collaboration for knowledge sharing and innovation by making internal knowledge available for one and all anytime and anywhere in a structured manner. There are definitely major issues in relying solely on folksonomy in the context of knowledge management. The lack of semantics connections, spelling variation, tags ambiguity, use of acronyms are some of the issues that create problems for documents only tagged with folksonomy. Using parallel indexing strategy on the other hand can create more confusion.

The key is to integrating folksonomy with traditional tagging methodology like taxonomy to knowledge discovery and sharing efficient and easier. It is the only way forward for KM 2.0 to be sustainable and successful in organization wide setting.

Coming up in next article difference between taxonomy and folksonomy... Stay tuned!

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Ekta Sachania is an experienced Knowledge and Content Manager based
in India.  

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