Folksonomies and science communication

Subtitle: A mash-up of professional science databases and Web 2.0 services

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Stock, Wolfgang G.

Affiliations: Department of Information Science, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, D-40225 Düsseldorf, Germany. E-mail: stock@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de

Abstract: Folksonomies complete the methods of indexing scientific documents. Now scientists in their function as readers may play an active role in science communication as well, since they can tag documents with terms taken from their professional or personal environment. Folksonomies allow the indexing of documents by everyone without following any rules. Besides the benefits of folksonomies there are severe problems, e.g. the tags' lack of precision. In order to overcome the shortcomings of this collaborative indexing method we introduce natural language processing of tags and a relevance ranking algorithm which is based on specific tag distributions, on aspects of collaboration and on the actions of the “prosumers”. This article is a plea for the combination of the “old” science databases and the benefits of the folksonomies.

Keywords: Folksonomy, tags, online information suppliers, science communication, Web 2.0, science databases, indexing, relevance ranking, tag distribution

DOI: 10.3233/ISU-2007-27303

Journal: Information Services & Use, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 97-103, 2007