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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010FOLKSONOMY: USING THE USERS’ FREEDOM TOORGANIZE TODAY’S WEB INFORMATION OVERLOADRoberto Pereira*, M. Cecília C. Baranauskas*, Sergio Roberto P. da Silva**,José Valderlei da Silva** and Filipe Roseiro Côgo***Institute of Computing (IC), University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Av. Albert Einstein, 1251, Campinas-SP, Brazil**Departament of Informatics (DIN), State University of Maringá (UEM), Av. Colombo, 5790, Maringá – PR, BrazilABSTRACTThe folksonomy technique represents an initiative for the organization of the information available on the Web. However,even systems that apply this technique suffer with problems of lack of quality and information overload when the numberof their users grows. Regardless of these problems, a wide range of systems became available allowing the categorizationof several distinct kinds of objects, but without any level of integration among them. In this paper, we present a criticalanalysis about the folksonomy technique, their nature, advantages, problems and challenges. We also propose twoapproaches for improving the results obtained with folksonomy. Indeed, we argue that the question now is how and whenassisting users when they are interacting with folksonomy-based systems, in order to make the use of folksonomy moreuseful in information organization and retrieval on the Web.KEYWORDSFolksonomy, social tagging, social categorization, folkauthority.1. INTRODUCTIONThe Web is suffering a quite big evolution, changing from a network that connects webpages, documents,and resources to a network that connects people, organizations and concepts (da Silva and Pereira, 2008;Freyne et al., 2007). It is becoming what is now called a Social Web. This new Web is characterized byfacilities for cooperation in contents production and sharing, and by facilities for communication and spreadof ideas among people. Due to the huge amount of contents available on the Web, technical difficulties andhigh execution costs make unviable the existence of qualified professionals controlling and evaluatingeverything that is produced and published on it. This lack of mechanisms, or measures, to assure the qualityof the information and to organize them, results in a problem now called information overload (Himma,2007; Levy, 2008). This overload is directly related to the fact that the amount of data, contents andinformation is very superior to the human’s capacity to absorb, interpret and manage it in a productive way.The folksonomy technique represents an initiative for helping in the process of organization andattribution of meaning to the contents available on the Web (Mathes, 2005). In systems that applyfolksonomy, these processes are not restricted to professional editors. These systems adopt the principle that,if someone is producing and publishing contents, s/he can also be apt to organize and to attribute meaning toit, labeling it with keywords (tags) in the way they judge more adequate. As a result, folksonomy becomes aninteresting and viable alternative for the open and highly changeable environment that is the Web.In folksonomy-based systems, the set of tags and objects of a user composes its personomy (da Silva andda Silva, 2008). This personomy reflects the users’ vocabularies, preferences, interests, and knowledge.When the individual personomies are made available and shared among all users of a system, we get thefolksonomy. Thus, a folksonomy is the structure that results from the sharing of all the users’ personomies(Mathes, 2005). The sharing and social aspects of folksonomy allow for the interaction among users, whatcontributes to the emergence and discovery of interesting knowledge and to the definition of a commonlanguage among them. However, despite these benefits, as the number of users in a folksonomy-based systemincreases and, thus, the information being categorized by them also increases, the problem of information143