The aim of this master's thesis is to investigate and to explain the concept of folksonomy in the perspective of knowledge organisation. By creating a conceptual explanation and defining what folksonomy as a concept consists of, the intent is to establish a basis for evaluating folksonomy and to discuss what relevance folksonomy may have in the field of knowledge organisation. By applying a qualitative content analysis a review is performed on how folksonomy is perceived and discussed in a selection of articles written on the subject. Employing the theory of classification, subject indexing and bibliographic retrieval, folksonomy as a method for knowledge organisation is analysed. The practice of tagging in existing systems is also studied. The study shows that folksonomy as a concept consists of documents, tags and users as well as the relations between these factors. The essential attributes are the lack of rules regarding creation of tags, the freedom from authorities imposing guidelines on how to determine the subject matter of documents and the participation of the users in both the indexing and retrieval phases. The term folksonomy represents both the browsable collection of documents and tags, the activity of assigning tags to documents and the vocabulary that is constructed. The relativistic and subjective nature, the simplicity and the lack of rules are inherent qualities of folksonomy, by some perceived as its major merits and by others as its flaws, hence the reasons why the application of folksonomy in knowledge organisation may be problematic. / Uppsatsnivå: D
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hb-18698 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Forsberg, Benjamin, Mogren, Hans |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Borås, Institutionen Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap / Bibliotekshögskolan, Högskolan i Borås, Institutionen Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap / Bibliotekshögskolan, University of Borås/Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Magisteruppsats i biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap vid institutionen Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap, 1654-0247 ; 2007:144 |
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