Folksonomii

Folksonomii is the plural form of folksonomy in some languages or contexts; in English the common plural is folksonomies. A folksonomy is a user-generated system of classification created through social tagging, where users attach freely chosen keywords—tags—to pieces of content.

The concept emerged with social bookmarking and photo-sharing sites in the early 2000s. Named by Thomas Vander Wal, it describes how tagging by many users yields a decentralized metadata system reflecting ordinary language, trends, and individual perspectives rather than a fixed taxonomy.

Key features are openness, scalability, and adaptability. Tags accumulate from diverse users, enabling quick discovery and emergent organization. However, lack of central control leads to ambiguity, synonyms, misspellings, and polysemy, complicating search, interoperability, and data integration with formal metadata standards.

Folksonomies complement—rather than replace—controlled vocabularies. Researchers study mappings between tags and standardized terms, while systems use tagging alongside filters, recommendations, and machine learning to improve retrieval. Hashtags in social media exemplify the folksonomic impulse, though they often serve narrower, context-specific tagging.

Overall, folksonomii/folksonomies illustrate a bottom-up approach to organizing information, balancing user relevance with the needs of search and discovery in dynamic online ecosystems.