Tomorrow I'm participating in a debate in Mike Crandall's course in Organization of Information Resources at the iSchool at University of Washington. I'll be representing for social tagging and folksonomy, and Gary Carlson, Chief Taxonomist of Schemalogic, unfortunate soul, will be arguing the side of structured taxonomy and controlled vocabulary.
Now, Gary's a good friend of mine. He's an expert in his field, with 10 years of deep thinking about taxonomies, vocabularies, thesauri, ontologies, and other foofaraw under his belt. He's an articulate salesman for information management in the enterprise. It wouldn't be at all a stretch to say he's the brains behind Schemalogic's success.
He must be NUTS, to want to debate me. Doesn't he realize I'm a consultant?
I've already got a lot to say about folksonomy and tagging, because it's a topic clients ask about fairly frequently. The basic gist of the argument in favor of bottom-up approaches to metadata is that they're cheaper and faster to implement, more accommodating of cultural differences, and quicker to adapt to changing mores. Plus, they're cool right now.
In other words, taxonomies are for corporate drones who have no desire to keep pace with change on the Web. They're for cubicle-bound, dusty-shouldered fuddy-duddies desperate to keep the seething masses at bay, lest someone notice their shoes, out of date since 1982. They want control--not even for the exercise of whatever arcane power they might gain, but for fear of change. For fear of chaos. For fear of obsolescence. You listening to me, Gary?
It's all good-natured, of course. We'll reach some kind of grand hybrid conclusion about appropriateness of different approaches in different circumstances. Along these lines:
Folksonomies are good when:
- Content objects need to be tagged rapidly and at a low cost,
- Duplication, ambiguity, and inconsistency serve to strengthen the overall information environment, promoting discoverability,
- Relevance is more important than comprehensiveness,
- And, users have incentive to tag, meaning usually either promoting their own content or making things easier to re-find.
Taxonomies are good when:
- You need to manage distributed information assets within a discrete set of communities, such as within a corporation,
- Accuracy is critical, such as in an inventory,
- You have a staff of library-science geeks you need to keep busy,
- If you're more interested in structure and control than in reality. You listening to me, Gary?
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