Social Tags

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy.
Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation.

Social Bookmarking is a method for internet users to share, organize, search and manage bookmarks online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves are not shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.
Attempts have been made to characterize folksonomy in social tagging system as emergent externalization of knowledge structures contributed by multiple users. Models of collaborative tagging have been developed to characterize how knowledge structures could arise and be useful to other users, even when there is a lack of top-down mediation (which is believed to be an important feature because they do not need laborious explicit representations as in semantic web). In particular, cognitive models of collaborative tagging can highlight how differences in internal knowledge structures of multiple users can lead to different emergent properties in the folksonomy of a social tagging system.

- Advantages

All of the classifications of internet resources are done by human beings, who understand the content of the resouce as opposes to software, which use algorithmic attempts to determine the meaning of the resource. Also people can find pages that have not yet been found or indexed by a web spider.

Exploiting Social Tags

For Music Information Retrieval
- Expanding the tag/ labeling coverage
- using tags for discovery
- improving the quality of tags



http://www.slideshare.net/plamere/social-tags-and-music-information-retrieval-part-i-presentation

"Music is created by humans for other humans, and humans
can bring a tremendous amount of contextual knowledge to
bear on anything they do; in fact, they can’t avoid it, and
they’re rarely conscious of it.
But computers can never bring much contextual knowledge to
bear, often none at all, and never without being specifically
programmed to do so. Therefore doing almost anything with
music by computers is very difficult; many problems are
essentially intractable "(Byrd, 2008).

Byrd, D. (2008). Organization and search of musical
information. Syllabus for a course at http://informatics.
indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/I545Site-Spring08/Syllabus
I545.html