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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010users, their choices, terminologies, i.e., users build and choose the vocabulary that they will use. Mathes(2005) sustains that, with this non-controlled nature and an organic growth, a folksonomy has the capacity toadapt very quickly to the changes in the vocabulary and to the users’ needs, which does not happen in anyother kind of system.In a folksonomy-based system, there are no formally pre-defined hierarchies for the vocabulary of tagsused in the categorizations. Thus, there is no direct specification of descendants or of a brotherhoodrelationship among the terms. The tags applied for the categorization are automatically related by cooccurrenceand group themselves into sets of tags based in common objects. In this way, the folksonomyprocess is very different from a formal taxonomy and from other classification schemes in which there aremultiple types of explicit relationships among terms.One important characteristic of the folksonomy technique, at least from the theoretical point of view, isthe freedom of choice in the quantity and type of words that can be applied to accomplish a categorization.This process is completely free, in other words, there is no control or scheme to be followed or respected insuch a way that users attribute the tags they want for categorizing an object. This freedom has seriousimplications over users’ cognitive effort to do the organization task, since this effort will be very inferiorwhen compared to the effort they need to do while selecting a specific classification in a hierarchicalstructure like a taxonomy. This is the main reason why such systems are easy to use. Regarding theinformation retrieval on the Web, traditional search engines (e.g., Google) uses complex algorithms for theindexation of Web contents, aiming to present better results for the users’ queries. Folksonomy-basedsystems have the advantage of representing exactly the users’ opinion, that is, it is not an algorithmattributing tags to objects, it is the users that are doing that—users with different opinions and views, indifferent contexts and with different goals.It is important to differentiate two main stages in the process of the folksonomy technique use: thecategorization and the retrieval stages. In the first one, the lack of control results in a great easiness for thecategorization process and provides the benefits previously mentioned. However, the choice of the tags (i.e.,the category a resource should belong) that best represents an object is not a trivial process. Whencategorizing a new object, users will attribute terms they judge more adequate at the categorization time andin a specific context, but there is no way to foresee or to know if those terms will also be adequate at the timewhen users will retrieve the information previously categorized by them. Previous knowledge and evenrecent activities accomplished by the users can exercise a lot of influence during the categorization process,so that users can end up choosing terms that are not frequently used in their vocabulary, that are ambiguousor that do not have a great meaning in a long time. Moreover, in general, users do not have effectiveresources to help them recalling or identifying terms previously used for the categorization of similar objects,which makes difficult the maintenance of an organized, coherent and well-structured vocabulary. Thesequestions are stressed when we take into account the existence of several different systems that a user couldinteract with.In the second stage, the information retrieval process suffers with problems of ambiguities, polysemy,noises and lack of standardization of the terms used for the categorization. These problems are consequencesof the freedom that folksonomy-based systems offer and affect the information retrieval negatively, oncewith a chaotic vocabulary, users will have difficulties in finding the content categorized by them before.These problems are stressed when considered from the collective point of view, since the tags’ idiosyncrasycollaborates to found rarities, i.e., for the serendipity, but it also harms the users’ work in trying to identify anappropriate term for doing a search. Further, it is necessary to question what the limits of the folksonomyusefulness are. The chaos originated from the lack of control provides interesting contributions to its easinessof use and allows the emergency of a bottom-up organization but, currently, it is not possible to determine thepoint from which the benefits of this disorganization are neutralized by its problems.Despite the problems generated by the heterogeneity of users’ tags, it does not mean the users are wrongor they are not categorizing information correctly. What users are categorizing is adequate to them or to asmall group, but it will not always bring contributions to the collective or to everyone. There are areas inwhich users are more, or less, recommended as information sources and it depends on their capacity, on thebasis and competences on the subjects they are categorizing, i.e., in their cognitive authority (Wilson, 1983;Pereira and da Silva, 2008)―we will explore more on this subject latter in our user-focused approach.Ohmukai et al. (2005) discuss about the possibility of using a controlled folksonomy. However, asMathes (2005) and Riddle (2005) argue, a controlled vocabulary seems to be practically unviable in the caseof applications such as Delicious. On the other hand, several authors (da Silva and Pereira, 2008; Halpin,145