Folksonomy for Knowledge Management 2.0
One of the biggest challenges faced by most
organizations is organizing, finding, and marking information in the knowledge
repository in such a way that it is easily accessible as and when needed by the
employees. The classical approach used widely is indexing documents to help
users in deciding documents relevancy and retrieval. Classical methods comprise classification
systems (taxonomies), thesaurus, and controlled keywords (nomenclatures)
[Aitchison et al. 2004; Cleveland and Cleveland 2001; Lancaster 2003; Stock and
Stock 2008].
Folksonomy is a most recent knowledge management (km) tool of web 2.0
for searching, accessing, and labelling information by the content creator and
the user in a way that makes sense to them. Folksonomies include novel social
dimensions of tagging [Mathes 2004; Smith 2004]. It is a new model for content
indexing based on collaborative tagging with user generated keywords that
broaden the spectrum of knowledge interpretation methods. Folksonomy is a valuable
addition to the traditional KM methodologies since it facilitates tagging input
from the end user, promote the use of active language, and most importantly
allows community navigation of an organization’s knowledge base in new ways.
With the introduction of folksonomy end user is no more a passive user
but an active contributor to the indexing and retrieval of content. These tags
are written in common language rather than the pre-conceived formal list based
on the user’s understanding of the content. The tags created by the end-users are searchable for everyone beside the
interpreter-created controlled terms and the author-created text words and
references (Stock, 2007). Keywords are no longer keywords now, but tags and the
collection of tags used to classify content on any different platform forms a
Folksonomy. This makes the content scalable and easy to find and use.
The purpose of
knowledge management is to encourage collaboration for knowledge sharing and
innovation by making internal knowledge available for one and all anytime and
anywhere in a structured manner. There are definitely major issues in relying
solely on folksonomy in the context of knowledge management. The lack of
semantics connections, spelling variation, tags ambiguity, use of acronyms are
some of the issues that create problems for documents only tagged with
folksonomy. Using parallel indexing strategy on the other hand can create more
confusion.
The key is to
integrating folksonomy with traditional tagging methodology like taxonomy to
knowledge discovery and sharing efficient and easier. It is the only way
forward for KM 2.0 to be sustainable and successful in organization wide
setting.
Coming up in next article
difference between taxonomy and folksonomy... Stay tuned!
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