Why a folksonomy?

 When I was cataloguing the contents of Dow’s pharmacy I used a folksonomy rather than a formal controlled vocabulary.

A folksonomy is of course simply an informal controlled vocabulary that is readily extensible, which is a good thing where, as in Dows, there was no clear understanding of what exactly the contents of the pharmacy might be.

So, and object at Dows can be

• a glass jar – jars have wide openings
• a glass bottle – bottles are taller than they are wide and have narrow openings
• a cardboard box
• something else such as a metal or plastic tube

a glass bottle can be

• clear – contents for internal use
• brown – contents for external use
• blue – contains something very nasty

except in very early bottles, blue and brown bottles are usually embossed Not to be Taken, and ribbed to aid identification in poor light. (incidentally it’s because of this ribbing we could say with some degree of plausibility that green pharmacy bottles are an alternative to brown bottles)

So, you get the idea, it’s quite simple to build up a classification model, and because we’re not encumbered by any previous sets of terms used, make up something that is human readable as well as machine readable.

The point about it being machine readable is that the standardisation of terms makes it easy to import and convert object descriptions into a more complex schema (as well as auto generate catalogue entries in the standard house style.)

So why did I use a folksonomy rather than pillaging an existing controlled vocabulary?

Well, folksonomies are simple, make sense to the humans doing the cataloguing – in this case it was only me, but if someone else had joined me on the project it would have been fairly simple to write down a set of definitions so that everything was classified the same way.

I’ve found in the past that using a controlled vocabulary doesn’t really work – the people actually doing the cataloguing tend to find them too complex to work with, and as a consequence you tend to find one person’s bottle is another person’s jar.

So, in cataloguing as in so much else in life, keeping things simple pays dividends...