Folksonomy: you use it daily, you move around it and you don't even know what it is

We surf the Internet daily surrounded by concepts such as jQuerys , wrappers, ransomware or scripts .with little or no knowledge of what any of the concepts that keep us busy hours mean every day.Why do we reason to know what is something as hidden as folksonomy ?

Of course, to understand folksonomy, one must first understand what taxonomy is.And, before that, know what labeling is and how information is organized in huge databases.You use it and move through her diary: it was time to know what folksonomy is .

The order of digital information

Having everything tidy is complex.This is known by anyone who has worked a couple of months with a computer.Or a few hours with people online.Although some guidelines are established at the beginning, exceptions appear, files you don't know one where to locate, and errors.The problem, of course, comes when we want to find something that we keep in its moment.

List systems

At the beginning (of the computers) there were lists. Option catalogs that started from the number 1 and whose maximum difficulty lay in knowing how to count.Each new element of the same list was placed next to the previous elements, and everything was ordered:

Although it was a simple system to handle (to execute a command or program it was enough to position itself on it), it was soon discovered that it was too basic .If one wanted to access The last option, you should press ↓ until you reach the desired goal.It was pocoutil.

List lists (and the folder system)

Soon the lists of lists were needed.Lists that included other lists within them, branching out ad infinitum .With the advantages that it brought (cleaner interfaces ) and with its disadvantages (or you knew the system or you were lost).

An example of open lists at the visual level is found by running ipconfig in the Windows CMD.There is a list (red) that includes two others (blue and orange).

Once it was possible to have a visual interface, all the computers acquired the classic folder system .Much more intuitive, but you don't hide more than lists with lists inside:

Tagging files

Soon, this system was limited.The folders were too many and, even if you tried to follow an order, there were always misplaced files .Luckily, the metadata appeared. The metadata they are tags that can be added to the files to make their location or recognition easier.

For example, on the website pixabay.com we find-next to the images-a short list of data (superimposed on the image above).These are the metadata of the image itself, and thanks it is easier for them to locate it in a folder.

The same system is usually used for music, in order to add author, album, anus...

Tagged with categories

Within the same computer, metadata are fine when it comes to organizing information, but what happened on the Internet, with millions of people with different approaches ? That this type of labeling was only valid for a number of objects.For example, if you place the mouse on the pink above, a “yellow rose with labels ” sign should appear.

It is the alt of the image, a type of label that serves when looking for images in, for example, Google.But, when we move through a website or a blog we are not searching in a search engine like this.To keep the web in order, the tags and categories of the web pages had to appear.

The Internet was getting complicated to become massacre, and this involved a great effort towards the webmasters when ordering the information on their page.Therefore many blogs and websites be a real chaos: categories and labels still raise questions of use.

In general, the categories are used for large classifications , while tags are added thinking of keywords from a blog post.

For many years, this was the taxonomy ( taxonomy , in English) or form of the hierarchy of web pages on the Internet.But, like so many other things, it soon became obsolete.

Democratic labeling or folksonomy

In recent years, the Internet has filled with people at a very high rate.As is often the case in a system when many new people suddenly enter, it was soon necessary a different approach to match the ideas of these people.

The problem? That there is no single classification approach for billions of new users.Each one has in mind a series of labels, rules and standards.For example, something as universalized as the date has more than a dozen of different representations:

A different approach was needed that would serve a large majority, but one that did not leave minorities behind.This approach was folksonomy , or democratic labeling .

Folksonomy starts from the basis that not all users are equal.As citizens of a society, each has a different approach to classification.So, instead of having a webmaster that is putting labels, the readers are allowed to add them.

The word folksonomia comes from merging:

• folk ( village , of the German sound Volk )


• ta xo (from Greek taxos , which means arrangement )


• nomia (from Greek rule or rule ).

In this system of ordering of the data, the rule is to let the people do it.In other words , a democratization of information .Not so much in access, but in the construction of it .

One of the most representative cases is del.icio.us, a website that allows you to save bookmarks using tags that we can then share.On the one hand, we can save websites for us in the same way that we use bookmarks in browsers.On the other, we are adding tags to the websites to be able to classify them.

Folksonomy is everywhere

For example, Twitter, which is actually a microblogging website, uses trending topics reading millions of tweets and taking out the most used words.users (folk) are adding micro-articles to the platform, the TT classification is changing.

Another social network in which folksonomy is used is LinkedIn.In each user's profile, he can add skills that are scored by his followers .Abilities that can also be suggested by them, and voted once approved.In this way, the profiles of our acquaintances have been built with close references.Depending on the score of our skills, we will receive some or other job offers.

Instagram or Pinterest, the social networks of the images, use search engines based on folksonom .For example, if the user uploads the tag #pascape , search engines will only find it when someone types that word, but in comments, other users can add #dawn #forest #fog tags.Yes, the image is linked to the new tags.

This is the mechanism of Unsplash, a social network of UHD Creative Commons Zero images in which users are asked to label the photos as they see fit, without restrictions.

Folksonomy is a classification system based on the social labeling of various shared spaces, but that users actively participate does not mean that they are aware of their labeling .

For example, in Google Trends.A system that links geolocation, day and search through Google to publish trend panels.A +1 is added to each search made with your search engine, resulting in systems from popular searches generated by a gigantic community .

Of course, there are many more examples.

Folksonomy is even in the soup, although only time will last how long this classification system lasts.Internet grows in a way so fast that there is a point where humans are not able to catalog all the data.

We may have to delegate this task to AIs based on deep learning , or forget to label it all.Although, for now, the system that works is that of the people: folksonomy.

Images | iStock/5xinc, Carina.org, Microsoft, FrancoGG, Polski, iStock/claudiobaba, Marcos Martinez, Aaron Burden, Unsplash, Google Trends