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The purpose of this paper is to highlight limits to the dominant model of social inclusion under which UK public libraries operate, to analyse how and to what extent processes of socio‐cultural exclusion emerge in the subject representation and discoverability of “non‐dominant” resources in public library OPACs, and to consider folksonomy as a solution to any issues raised.

The paper first develops a critique of the dominant model of “inclusion” within UK public libraries, drawing on feminist and critical theories of identity. It then considers how this critique overlaps with and offers fresh insights into major debates within subject indexing, and develops a theoretical rationale for considering the potential of folksonomy to intervene in more inclusive subject‐indexing design. A user‐based critical interpretive methodology which understands OPACs as texts open to multiple interpretations is developed, and a comparative reading of standard OPACs and LibraryThing folksonomy is undertaken to evaluate the discoverability and subject representation of LGBTQ and ethnic minority resources.

LibraryThing folksonomy offers benefits over LCSH subject indexing in the discoverability and representation of LGBTQ resources. However, the folksonomy is dominated by US taggers, and this impacts on the tagging of ethnic minority resources. Folksonomy, like traditional indexing, is found to contain its own biases in worldview and subject representation.

The importance of subject indexing in developing inclusive library services is highlighted and a new method for evaluating OPACs is developed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate users' knowledge and use of social networking sites and folksonomies to discover if social tagging and folksonomies, within the area of independent music, aid in its information retrieval and discovery. The sites examined in this project are MySpace, Lastfm, Pandora and Allmusic. In addition, the ways in which independent record labels utilise social networking sites for promotion are investigated.

Three groups of participants were surveyed using questionnaires. These groups were music concert attendees, people who responded to online postings to social networking sites, and independent record companies. In addition interviews were held with digital music experts.

The results suggest that respondents use social networking sites for music discovery but are not generally aware of folksonomic approaches to music discovery. When users do use and contribute to the folksonomy, most respondents were found to tag for personal retrieval purposes rather than attempting to aid the retrieval purposes of the population of site users as a whole. The four record labels unanimously agreed that social networking sites are having a major impact on independent music discovery. Digital distribution has a major impact on independent record labels. It facilitates discovery but at the same time digital distribution creates new promotional dilemmas.

The project is small scale but the research area is a relatively novel one, and the results are interesting enough to share more generally in the hope that this project will stimulate further research activity in this area.

The purpose of this article is to provide a quantitative analysis of the extent to which folksonomies replicate the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to see if folksonomies would successfully complement cataloger‐supplied subject headings in library catalogs.

The paper compares social tags and LC subject headings for ten books from various library‐related applications including next generation OPACs and LibraryThing by ranking tags and subject headings using scales modified from research by Golder and Huberman, Voorbij, and Kipp.

Social tagging does indeed augment LCSH by providing additional access to resources.

Several of our applications lacked tags for the books we chose in our study. Tags are primarily taken from LibraryThing.

A hybrid catalog combining both LCSH and a folksonomy would result in richer metadata and be stronger than the sum of its parts, giving patrons the best of both worlds in terms of access to materials.

This paper supplies quantitative support for the use of folksonomies in a library's catalog. The data also supports many of the previous theories proposed in literature about folksonomies and social tagging.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of enriching the library subject headings with folksonomy for enhancing the visibility and usability of the library subject headings.

The WorldCat-million data set and SocialBM0311 are preprocessing and over 210,000 library catalog records and 124,482 non-repeating tags were adopted to construct the matrix to observe the semantic relation between library subject headings and folksonomy. The proposed system is compared with the state-of-the-art methods and the parameters are fixed to obtain effective performance.

The results demonstrate that by integrating different semantic relations from library subject headings and folksonomy, the system’s performance can be improved compared to the benchmark methods. The evaluation results also show that the folksonomy can enrich library subject headings through the semantic relationship.

The proposed method simultaneous weighted matrix factorization can integrate the semantic relation from the library subject headings and folksonomy into one semantic space. The observation of the semantic relation between library subject headings and social tags from folksonomy can help enriching the library subject headings and improving the visibility of the library subject headings.

Classification is an important process in making sense of the world, and has a pronounced social dimension. This paper aims to compare folksonomy, a new social classification system currently being developed on the web, with conventional taxonomy in the light of theoretical sociological and anthropological approaches. The co‐existence of these two types of classification system raises the questions: Will and should taxonomies be hybridized with folksonomies? What can each of these systems contribute to information‐searching processes, and how can the sociology of knowledge provide an answer to these questions? This paper aims also to address these issues.

This paper is situated at the meeting point of the sociology of knowledge, epistemology and information science and aims at examining systems of classification in the light of both classical theory and current late‐modern sociological and anthropological approaches.

Using theoretical approaches current in the sociology of science and knowledge, the paper envisages two divergent possible outcomes.

While concentrating on classifications systems, this paper addresses the more general social issue of what we know and how it is known. The concept of hybrid knowledge is suggested in order to illuminate the epistemological basis of late‐modern knowledge being constructed by hybridizing contradictory modern knowledge categories, such as the subjective with the objective and the social with the natural. Integrating tree‐like taxonomies with folksonomies or, in other words, generating a naturalized structural order of objective relations with social, subjective classification systems, can create a vast range of hybrid knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the linking of a folksonomy (user vocabulary) and LCSH (controlled vocabulary) on the basis of word matching, for the potential use of LCSH in bringing order to folksonomies.

A selected sample of a folksonomy from a popular collaborative tagging system, Delicious, was word‐matched with LCSH. LCSH was transformed into a tree structure called an LCSH tree for the matching. A close examination was conducted on the characteristics of folksonomies, the overlap of folksonomies with LCSH, and the distribution of folksonomies over the LCSH tree.

The experimental results showed that the total proportion of tags being matched with LC subject headings constituted approximately two‐thirds of all tags involved, with an additional 10 percent of the remaining tags having potential matches. A number of barriers for the linking as well as two areas in need of improving the matching are identified and described. Three important tag distribution patterns over the LCSH tree were identified and supported: skewedness, multifacet, and Zipfian‐pattern.

The results of the study can be adopted for the development of innovative methods of mapping between folksonomy and LCSH, which directly contributes to effective access and retrieval of tagged web resources and to the integration of multiple information repositories based on the two vocabularies.

The linking of controlled vocabularies can be applicable to enhance information retrieval capability within collaborative tagging systems as well as across various tagging system information depositories and bibliographic databases.

This is among frontier works that examines the potential of linking a folksonomy, extracted from a collaborative tagging system, to an authority‐maintained subject heading system. It provides exploratory data to support further advanced mapping methods for linking the two vocabularies.

Recently, with a high volume of users and user’s content in Community Question Answering (CQA) sites, the quality of answers provided by users has raised a big concern. Finding the expert users can be a method to address this problem, which aims to find the suitable users (answerers) who can provide high-quality relevant answers. The purpose of this paper is to find the expert users for the newly posted questions of the CQA sites.

In this paper, a new algorithm, RANKuser, is proposed for identifying the expert users of CQA sites. The proposed RANKuser algorithm consists of three major stages. In the first stage, folksonomy relation between users, tags, and queries is established. User profile attributes, namely, reputation, tags, and badges, are also considered in folksonomy. In the second stage, expertise scores of the user are calculated based on reputation, badges, and tags. Finally, in the third stage, the expert users are identified by extracting top N users based on expertise score.

In this work, with the help of proposed ranking algorithm, expert users are identified for newly posted questions. In this paper, comparison of proposed user ranking algorithm (RANKuser) is also performed with other existing ranking algorithms, namely, ML-KNN, rankSVM, LDA, STM CQARank, and EV-based model using performance parameters such as hamming loss, accuracy, average precision, one error, F-measure, and normalized discounted cumulative gain. The proposed ranking method is also compared to the original ranking of CQA sites using the paired t-test. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RANKuser algorithm in comparison with the existing ranking algorithms.

This paper proposes and implements a new algorithm for expert user identification in CQA sites. By utilizing the folksonomy in CQA sites and information of user profile, this algorithm identifies the experts.

The purpose of this paper is to use ideas drawn from two founders of American pragmatism, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, in order to propose a philosophical foundation that supports the value of collaborative tagging and reinforces the structure and goals of the Semantic Web.

The study employs a close analysis of key literature by James and Peirce to answer recent calls for a philosophy of the Web and to respond to research in the LIS literature that has assessed the value and limitations of folksonomy. Moreover, pragmatic views are applied to illustrate the relationships among collaborative tagging, linked data, and the Semantic Web.

With a philosophical foundation in place, the study highlights the value of the minority tags that fall within the so-called “long tail” of the power law graph, and the importance of granting sufficient time for the full value of folksonomy to be revealed. The discussion goes further to explore how “collaborative tagging” could evolve into “collaborative knowledge” in the form of linked data. Specifically, Peirce’s triadic architectonic is shown to foster an understanding of the construction of linked data through the functional requirements for bibliographic records entity-relation model and resource description framework triples, and James’s image of the multiverse anticipates the goals Tim Berners-Lee has articulated for the Semantic Web.

This study is unique in using Jamesian and Peircean thinking to argue for the value of folksonomy and to suggest implications for the Semantic Web.

Through a theoretical review of the literature, this chapter assesses the potential of different knowledge organisation systems (KOS) to support corporate knowledge management systems (KMS), namely digital libraries (DL) in companies and other institutions. Questions are framed through which the chapter discusses how classical KOS, such as nomenclatures, classification systems, thesauri and ontologies, are able to reflect explicit knowledge in sense of the Semantic Web and also introduces persons as documents along with folksonomies as a means for externalising implicit knowledge in sense of the Web 2.0.

This chapter aims to discuss the issues associated with social indexing as a solution to the challenges of current information organization systems by investigating the quality and efficacy of social indexing.

The chapter focuses on the study which compared indexing similarity between two professional groups and also compared social tagging and professional indexing. The study employed the method of the modified vector-based Indexing Consistency Density (ICD) with three different similarity measures: cosine similarity, dot product similarity, and Euclidean distance metric.

The investigation of social indexing in comparison of professional indexing demonstrates that social tags are more accurate descriptions of resources and reflection of more current terminology than controlled vocabulary. Through the characteristics of social tagging discussed in this chapter, we have a clearer understanding of the extent to which social indexing can be used to replace and improve upon professional indexing.

As investment in professionally developed web directories diminishes, it becomes even more critical to understand the characteristics of social tagging and to obtain benefit from it. In future research, the examination of subjective tags needs to be conducted. A survey or user study on tagging behavior also would help to extend understanding of social indexing practices.