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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2007; Sturtz, 2004; Wu, 2006) defend the research and development of resources that allow a better use ofthe benefits provided by a folksonomy and that could contribute to the quality of the information produced infolksonomy-based systems. They argue that the main cause of the success of systems like Delicious andFlickr is the immediate feedback they can provide to users. Moreover, these systems make it visible theindividual and collective aspects related to the users’ behavior in the information organization process,something that cannot be obtained with such wealth of details in a system that apply a controlled vocabulary.The authors show the need of investments in additional resources for the improvement of folksonomy-basedsystems, because as we also believe, trying to control a folksonomy is the same as disfiguring it or passing toadopt a more liberal taxonomy.In his discussions about tagging, Smith (2008) put focus in four tension points: i) Personal vs. Social, ii)Idiosyncratic vs. Standard, iii) Freedom vs. Control, and iv) Amateur vs. Expert, that exist in systems thatapply folksonomy.In Personal vs. Social: the issues here lead to questions like: What is the main goal behind the objectscategorization in tagging-based systems? What is the social nature of tagging? And, what is its greatcontribution: selfishness or altruism? Do users make categorizations for their own benefit or are theymotivated by the desire of sharing information, opinions, and knowledge, or to be seen as knowledgeable in acertain subject, or by other social factors?In Idiosyncratic vs. Standard: the issues here are related to information organization and retrieval process,leading to questions like: Should the tags used be unique and idiosyncratic or should they be standardized?The tags located in the long tail of the users’ vocabulary are noises or are useful details about users and theirsubjectivity? Can these tags be used for disambiguation or context identification, or any other process? Ourtag-focused approach concerns this tension point through the centralization and management of the users’vocabularies.In Freedom vs. Control: the issues here are related to how systems induce users’ activities, leading toquestions like: Do systems give users complete freedom or do they influence or control the users’ tags?When the system offers suggestions, is it changing the behavior that the users would have if no suggestionswere made? Moreover, what can bring more contributions in both information categorization and retrieval: tocontrol tagging or to keep its freedom nature? Both our approaches (user and tag-focused) keep this freedomreinforcing our arguments about the need of resources for assist the users instead of controlling the process.In Amateur vs. Expert: the issues here are related to the quality of the information made available bythese systems leading to questions: How qualified are the people tagging objects? Should the tags created andthe categorizations made by amateurs count as much as the ones made by experts? How does the systemreconcile popular opinion with experts’ opinions when they disagree? And, How can it be known who areexperts and who are amateurs? Our user-focused approach addresses this question and, together with themanagement and centralization of the users’ vocabulary, aims at improving the quality of the informationretrieved in folksonomy-based systems.It must be pointed out that all questions raised in this section are emphasized when we consider that usershave to deal with different systems for categorizing different objects. In this context, in the next sections wepresent an approach focused on the tags used for categorizing objects, aiming at centralizing and managingthe users’ vocabularies, and another approach focused on users and directed at the question of the quality ofthe information retrieved through the folksonomy technique, preserving its open and evolving nature.2.1 Managing PersonomiesThe popularity of the folksonomy technique led to the existence of a wide range of systems. Usually, thesesystems focus on a specific kind of object, we can cite as examples: the Youtube, focusing on videos; theDelicious, focusing on bookmarks; the Flickr focusing on photos; the CiteULike, focusing on papers, etc. Themain goal of these systems is the organization and sharing of their specific objects, in a way that users canbuild a personomy and share it with other users―generating a folksonomy.However, once users have created an account in a folksonomy-based system, they do not have anyresource for reusing the vocabulary of tags applied in their categorizations when using another system. Itmeans that, for each system, users will have to create a different and independent personomy. This situationcontributes to several difficulties and problems in using folksonomy-based systems. To make it clear,consider the following example: a teacher giving a lecture in a conference desires to categorize and share146