Folksonomies. Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0

In Web 2.0 users not only make heavy use of Col-laborative Information Services in order to create, publish and share digital information resources - what is more, they index and represent these re-sources via own keywords, so-called tags. The sum of this user-generated metadata of a Collaborative Information Service is also called Folksonomy. In contrast to professionally created and highly struc-tured metadata, e.g. subject headings, thesauri, clas-sification systems or ontologies, which are applied in libraries, corporate information architectures or commercial databases and which were developed according to defined standards, tags can be freely chosen by users and attached to any information resource. As one type of metadata Folksonomies provide access to information resources and serve users as retrieval tool in order to retrieve own re-sources as well as to find data of other users.

The book delivers insights into typical applications of Folksonomies, especially within Collaborative Information Services, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Folksonomies as tools of knowl-edge representation and information retrieval. More-over, it aims at providing conceptual considerations for solving problems of Folksonomies and presents how established methods of knowledge representa-tion and models of information retrieval can successfully be transferred to them.

Autorentext

Isabella Peters, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf

Zusammenfassung

edited by
Wolfgang G. Stock (Düsseldorf, Germany)

in close cooperation with a board of co-editors
Ronald E. Day (Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A.),
Richard J. Hartley (Manchester, U.K.),
Robert M. Hayes (Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.),
Peter Ingwersen (Copenhagen, Denmark),
Michel J. Menou (Les Rosiers sur Loire, France, and London, U.K.),
Stefano Mizzaro (Udine, Italy),
Christian Schlögl (Graz, Austria),
Sirje Virkus (Tallinn, Estonia)

ISSN 1868-842X

Knowledge and Information (K&I) is a peer-reviewed information science book series appearing as a print and as an ebook version, publishing high quality research monographs and topic-specific collections of papers as well. It covers information science to the full extent and alludes additionally to neighboring sciences such as computer science, computational linguistics, (information) business administration, and library science. The language of publication is English.

The scope of information science comprehends representing, providing, searching and finding of relevant knowledge including all activities of information professionals (e.g., indexing and abstracting) and users (e.g., their information behavior). An important research area is information retrieval, the science of search engines and their users. Topics of knowledge representation include metadata as well as methods and tools of knowledge organization systems (folksonomies, nomenclatures, classification systems, thesauri, and ontologies). Informetrics is empirical information science and consists among others of the domain-specific metrics (e.g., scientometrics, webometrics, patent analysis), user and usage research, and evaluation of information systems. Knowledge management is concerned with the sharing and distribution of internal and external information in organizations. The information market can be defined by the exchange of digital information on networks, especial the World Wide Web. Further important research areas of information science are information ethics, information law, information sociology, and information policy.

Information science provides basic research for other scientific fields, among others for computer science and for library science, and for a lot of practical endeavors, such as the construction of search engines, the organization of digital libraries as well as commercial information supply, the operation of catalogues of libraries, museums etc., the installation and maintenance of corporate knowledge management, the design of Web sites, and business strategies on the WWW.

The editors like to invite all information science scholars to offer

• monographs of research results (including Ph.D.-Theses) and
• suggestions for collections of papers
  for publication in K&I. All books may have a volume of about 300 pages or more. Monographs and articles in collections will be reviewed at least by two of the editors or co-editors.

For proposals, suggestions, questions, etc. please contact
Wolfgang G. Stock (stock@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de),
Katsiaryna S. Baran (Katsiaryna.Baran@uni-duesseldorf.de) or
one of the co-editors.