There's a revolution going on in the art and science of categorization, and its name is folksonomy, a term term invented by information architect Thomas Vander Wal. Folksonomy is like taxonomy, the traditional way to impose structure on the blooming confu
This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." Th
Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by formal terms used in data that they might generate or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social web. They are created a