Folksonomies

Folksonomies are informal lists of keywords created by users of content-sharing Web sites, such as del.icio.us (for bookmarks) and Flickr (for photos). Unlike controlled vocabularies, which consist of preferred and variant terms created by professional indexers, folksonomies contain current terms used by real people to categorize their own stuff. The real power of folksonomies lies in sharing lists of categories among users and applying them in search and discovery applications. Ideally, they are integrated with traditional metadata structures, such as thesauri. http://www.montague.com/roundtable38.html (Added by CALYX information essentials 20090514)