Folksonomy Formation

Tags, words or short phrases attached to items on the Internet, organize the social Web. Unlike expert-maintained taxonomies such as the Dewey Decimal Classification, tags evolve organically based on the collective action of individual users. The collection of tags in a tagging system, called a folksonomy, can vary widely from site to site. The paper mentions that the combination of eager taggers and intelligent algorithms that nurture effective tagging behavior promises a bright future for tagging systems.