Folksonomy

The term folksonomy combines the words "folk" and "taxonomy" to describe a system implemented by Flickr (flickr.com ) and Delicious (http://del.icio.us ) for classifying digital data based on input from all individuals using the system.

In a library, books are classified by subject or genre, such as literature and science, or fiction and periodicals. Classification can be seen as arranging "data" (in this case, the books themselves) according to the type of data contained, or using metadata. Metadata refer to "data about data" and are useful to correlate and assemble the types of contained information. The unwieldy amount of data on the Internet has inspired new approaches to classification, such as user-created metadata.

Over the Internet, through photo-sharing and bookmarking sites such as Flickr and Delicious, the users who access the information assign it metadata for their own use and share it with others across the Web. According to Wikipedia, "A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging."

Tags are basically crude metadata that users are able create for various content on the Web. For example, if you see a picture of a brown cat on Flickr, you can apply a tag to it, such as "cat", "brown", "tan", or "kitty", and the tags are saved. If another user does a search for "cat" or "kitty" on the Flickr website, the picture of the brown cat will be displayed in the search results.

On Facebook, millions of photographs have been uploaded, making it one of the largest photo archives, but it would be an endless task for users to tag all of them. An application called Photo Finder helps members of Facebook find photographs of themselves and their friends using facial recognition technology. Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa applications also use the same technology. This photo-finding application can be installed on your Facebook's account. Once installed, it scans the photo albums in a user's network and automatically applies tags in a highly efficient and accurate manner.

This technology allows Facebook members to easily locate photos and tag them, but also it has raised privacy issues. Any stranger can use this application with a photo of someone, whom they may only know from the local cafe or online gaming. The stranger can potentially cause harm by running the photo through Photo Finder and digging up personal information. To make the application more secure, Face.com has worked closely with Facebook in order to place limits on its uses based on the user privacy profile setting, but the limitations are not very clear.

At Carnegie Mellon University, another interesting use of tagging has been devised that helps in the digitizing of books. Optical character resolution (OCR) is a technique for digitizing books, wherein the image of a page is scanned and then converted to a text. The conversion into text is not very accurate and requires a lot of human input in order to be successful and correct. CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a totally different technology used to protect a website from cyber attacks of breaking a password, in which the hacker uses a script or tool to try all possible combinations of passwords. Students and professors at CMU combined CAPTCHA with OCR for successful digitizing. Now instead of one word, two words are presented to the user. Of these two words, one is used for security and the second is the word for which computer was not able to successfully digitize it. Facebook and google have adopted this new technology: reCAPTCHA.