Folksonomy thoughts
Taxonomies and ontologies are not a bad way to organize data. After all the Dewey Decimal System, Yahoo, and the yellow pages all use imposed structure and organization. Even this blog uses catagories. The problem begins to manifest itself when you try to search on concepts rather than on keywords, or if you need to find something that you don’t know what to call it.
Enter metadata and tags. Allowing (or forcing) people to set keywords on their own documents while they’re creating them. MS Word has had the ability to assign metatags for years. The two problems have been (1) I may not use the tags that you would use and (2) no one actually assigned them.
Enter folksonomies. The most popular examples are del.icio.us and Flickr. Both leverage the desire of individuals to sort their own data. The tags come from users who wish to sort their own bookmarks and their own pictures. Both then use the power of the network to consolidate the tags as well as show some interesting interconnections.