Are folksonomies shared conceptualizations?

This article presents a method to assess whether folksonomies are useful shared conceptualizations for conceptual modeling. A method based on the tripartite model (actors, concepts and instances) induces from social applications a folksonomy related to a domain of knowledge. The hypothesis of this paper is that if folksonomies are shared conceptualizations, then using them in conceptual modeling should reduce the number of divergences between actors when they elicit terms to be part of a model (a concept map in this article). A controlled experiment of conceptual modeling was performed with experimental groups who received tags inducted from data of categorizations from Delicious and control groups who received terms extracted from Web pages categorized on Delicious. The results show that the experimental groups obtained less divergences (on average) in elicitation of terms when compared to control groups.