Collabulary
I found this a few days ago and realized that it embodied the difference between how I understand tag folksonomies and how others (with whom I’ve argued) may see them. That is, I see the role of the social group — the wisdom of the crowd — as essential to the success of our folksonomic efforts. As it turns out, somebody’s come up with a word that emphasizes that (uncoordinated) collaboration: collabulary. Here’s how it reads in Wikipedia:
Collabulary, a portmanteau word combining “collaborative” and “vocabulary”, refers to a theoretical method of labelling and organising data by collaborative tagging. It avoids the weaknesses of a controlled vocabulary, ontology and folksonomy by combining their strengths.
It is a thesaurus of metadata generated by multiple end users.
Content consumers define tags, which are then attributed to the content. The quality of relevance between the user-generated metadata and the content is strengthened by other users in a democratic fashion, i.e. if two users define an object as being ‘white’ and one user defines an object as being ‘cream’ then a relevance can be defined as “more white than cream”, with this statement being derived by the data structure, which in turn has been defined by users.
Thus, as in the strength of a collaborative system such as a wiki, the combined effort of many users strengthen the rating of metadata and erroneous definitions (for example, through poor spelling, poor understanding, or poor use of the content or the system on which it resides) also known as meta noise, are reduced to minimal levels.
The data structure generated can be interpreted by software (for generation of enhanced tag clouds which show hierarchical data structures) and by humans (to see their influence on the organisation of information within a system).
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[...] Bob Garlitz, who’s trying to decide between blogging at Typepad and Blogspot, wrote to offer a somewhat older phrase for the success of social software as described in The Wisdom of Crowds and in the definition of collabulary: “the ignorant perfection of ordinary people.†[...]
I’d like to lay claim to coining ‘collabulary’.
I work for a very large media company and this term might be used as a way to define how our content object model may be adapted and enhanced when the public start using the archive of material the organisation is planning to release through through the internet in the coming years.
I was trying to find a term that would match our needs, finding that none existed.
The strategy behind the deployment is truly vast, so it’s unlikely that this will be the last term needed to define what might be done in this project, as things are being planned for the web that simply have never been done before.
You heard it here first
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[...] “Collabulary” is a neologism combining “collaborative” and “vocabulary“, purportedly coined by Alex Goodey. From the Wikipedia entry: Collabulary refers to a theoretical method of labelling and organising data by collaborative tagging. It can avoid the weaknesses of a controlled vocabulary, ontology and folksonomy while combining their strengths. It is a thesaurus of metadata generated by multiple end users. [...]
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[...] probably putting it too strongly. Ironic because I love both Wikipedia (and, especially, collabularies), but I grit my teeth pretty much every time I hear somebody suggest we need another [...]
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