Folksonomy: The new way to serendipity

Abstract: Folksonomy expands the collaborative process by allowing contributors to index content. It rests on three powerful properties: the absence of a prior taxonomy, multi-indexation and the absence of thesaurus. It concerns a more exploratory search than an entry in a search engine. Its original relationship-based structure (the three-way relationship between users, content and tags) means that folksonomy allows various modalities of curious explorations: a cultural exploration and a social exploration. The paper has two goals. Firstly, it tries to draw a general picture of the various folksonomy websites. Secundly, since labelling lacks any standardisation, folksonomies are often under threat of invasion by noise. This paper consequently tries to explore the different possible ways of regulating the self-generated indexation process. Key words: taxonomy, indexation, innovation and user-created content. n December 17th 2006 Time chose you as personality of the year. You, that is, you the internet user in the sense that you contributed to the history of community and collaboration on a greater scale than ever before. This is the symbol of a turning point in the information society