Tagging, folksonomy, distributed classification, ethnoclassificationhowever it is labelled, the concept of users creating and aggregating their own metadata is gaining ground on the internet. This literature review briefly defines the topic at hand, looking at current implementations and summarizing key advantages and disadvantages of distributed classification systems with reference to prominent folksonomy commentators. After considering whether distributed classification can replace expert catalogers entirely, it concludes that distributed classification can make an important contribution to digital information organisation, but that it may need to be integrated with more traditional organisation tools to overcome its current weaknesses.
My paper Telling Experts from Spammers: Expertise Ranking in Folksonomies, a joint work written together with fellow Ph.D. candidate Ching-Man Au Yeung from
T. Ley, and P. Seitlinger. CEUR Workshop Proceedings of the International Workshop on Adaptation in Social and Semantic Web (SASWeb2010), 590, page 13-18. (2010)
R. Wetzker, C. Zimmermann, C. Bauckhage, and S. Albayrak. WSDM '10: Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, page 71--80. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2010)
M. Noll, C. man Au Yeung, N. Gibbins, C. Meinel, and N. Shadbolt. SIGIR '09: Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, page 612--619. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)