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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISoverload starts to undermine the system usefulness, as in the individual as in the collective (i.e., social) pointof view.In this paper we are concerned about what should be done for obtaining better results with the applicationof the folksonomy technique. We argue that it is necessary to focus on the three pivots of the folksonomyprocess (the object, the tag and the user) simultaneously with different views if we want to offer a betterassistance to users of folksonomy-based systems. Also, we should take into account the four tension points infolksonomy pointed by Smith (2008): i) the individual vs. collective; ii) control vs. freedom; iii) idiosyncraticvs. standardized and iv) amateurs vs. experts. To achieve this goal, we discuss the folksonomy techniquetrying to explain its operation. We give special attention to the four tension points presenting two mainapproaches. In the first one, a tag-focused approach, we present a system for centralizing and managing theusers’ vocabularies and for searching over a set of folksonomy-based systems at once. This systemcorresponds to a partial solution to the problem of users having to deal simultaneously with several systems.In the second one, a users-focused approach, we explain the folkauthority technique, a partial solution for theproblem of the information retrieval quality. Finally, we present some additional minor approaches forreinforcing our researches and expose our conclusions.2. THE FOLKSONOMY TECHNIQUEStarting from the middle of 2002, labels of texts grew a lot in popularity as many websites started allowingtheir users to accomplish annotations or to use simple words (i.e., tags) in the form of a non-structured text ina process called tagging (Smith, 2008). Initially these annotations were individual, allowing people to ascribesome “meaning” to the website contents by means of classifying its URLs, photos, blogs posts or any otherresource (i.e., object) susceptible to be referenced. The use of this technique creates a personomy―a set oftags created by a person to organize resources of his/her interest only. When personomies are made availableand shared among users of a system, we get what is called a folksonomy. Thus, a folksonomy is the structurethat results from the sharing of all the users’ personomies (Mathes, 2005), i.e., the collective/collaborativetagging. The whole folksonomy process is essentially based on three pivots (see Figure 1): the user―whodoes the categorization, the object―which is categorized, and the tag―which makes the categorizationlabeling the object (Mathes, 2005; Riddle, 2005).Figure 1. The three pivots of Folksonomy.The usefulness of a tag is very wide (Riddle, 2005). When they are applied to the organization ofinformation on the Web, tags can aid in the personal information retrieval process, describing and structuringthis information and attributing order and meaning. Among the advantages of allowing users to do thecategorization process are the reductions of costs in time and with investments in specialized services(Mathes, 2005). To users, the costs are in the cognitive effort to carry out the categorization process and inthe time needed to do it. These costs, however, becomes small when compared to the investment necessary tomaintain an organization done by professionals or specialists, which is impracticable in an open and evolvingenvironment like the Web.Russell (2005) argues that folksonomy-based systems allow information to be found on which usersprobably would never be presented in another way. Mathes (2005) and Sturtz (2004) characterize this asserendipity. They assert that folksonomy favors the discovery of knowledge and of useful and interestinginformation. Moreover, according to them, perhaps, the most important benefit of the folksonomy techniqueis its capacity to reflect the users’ vocabulary. These systems reflect directly the actions executed by the144