folksonomier

Folksonomier is a term used in some languages to refer to aspects related to folksonomies, a bottom-up approach to organizing information through user-generated tags. The practice emerged with early social bookmarking and Web 2.0 ecosystems, where users freely assign keywords to online items, creating a collective tagging vocabulary rather than a formal taxonomy.

A folksonomy contrasts with a traditional taxonomy in that it lacks a pre-defined hierarchical structure; tags proliferate, drift in meaning, and are highly context-dependent. Over time, tag collections may cohere into informal groupings or tag clouds, rather than into a curated, controlled scheme. This spontaneity can reflect current usage and local relevance but may reduce consistency across items.

Advantages of folksonomies include scalability, rapid adaptation to new topics, and a language that matches how users think and talk about content. They can improve discoverability in large, diverse datasets, and enable social signaling of relevance through tagging frequency and co-occurrence patterns.

Challenges involve inconsistency, polysemy (one tag with multiple meanings) and synonymy (different tags for the same concept), noise from abusive or irrelevant tags, and governance issues regarding quality and moderation. The lack of formal semantics can hinder interoperability, especially across platforms.

Applications are common in social tagging, photo and video sharing, bookmarking services, and Q&A platforms. Some platforms employ hybrid approaches that blend user-generated tags with controlled vocabularies to improve precision without sacrificing flexibility. The term folksonomier is less common in English, with folksonomy as the standard term.