lets make a match…
Ontology, Taxonomy and Folksonomy
Prior to lecture and furthermore the tute, i didn’t know what these terms were, probably because id never heard of them before. However after learning what they are, what they are used for, you begin to understand website and systems more in depth.
Ontology: “An ontology in both computer science and information science is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to define the domain.”en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)
“defines (specifies) the concepts, relationships, and other distinctions that are relevant for modeling a domain.” tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-definition-2007.htm
This is from BBC news and i think this website is a pretty good example of Ontology.
Taxonomy: “A taxonomy is a collection of Controlled Vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure. Each term in a taxonomy is in one or more parent/child (broader/narrower) relationships to other terms in the taxonomy.” et.afsnet.org/glossary.html
“Referring to the science of hierarchically classifying animals by categories (phylum (pl. phyla), class, order, family, genus (pl. genera), species and subspecies) which share common features and are thought to have a common evolutionary descent.” www.animalinfo.org/glosst.htm
This image is from devianart where images are placed into categories which have sub-categories which also have sub-categories.
Folksonomy: “A means of classifying and categorizing data on the web through collaborative efforts from the online community. This is more commonly known as (though not strictly synonymous to) ‘tagging’.” www.brownbatterystudios.com/sixthings/2006/02/24/a-quick-web-20-glossary/
Flickr can have photos with a maximum of 75 tags, with examples being very specific, such as mountain; to quite broad, such as skiing. What this does, it allows the viewer to find images that relate to the given word and therefore it can expand the identity of the image and how people perceive the image and what it means/stand for. Some images can have a direct meaning i.e a image of a tree will always be a tree, whereas an image of a burning flag will have different meanings i.e terrorism, freedom, war, protest etc.
Throughout the internet there needs to be some form of classification as the information on the web is vast and numerous. This can result in information being lost and unfound, by having a system to categorise the information, the public are able to view certain information with ease. So there are specific ‘sets’ that are created to help modify and benefit the public in viewing selected information. Even search engines such as Google and Yahoo have to order their search engine results. The results have to be ordered various ways again; accuracy in matching words, how popular the website is, information content etc. So you can see how the internet is run by categories as humans need structure to understand information. This article from ZDNet talks about if computers can be made to sort information like humans, inside this article it discusses structure and how humans need to analyse informaion to make a uniformed decision on what it is/where it belongs etc.
The following is from the article ‘Can computers sort data like humans?’:
“Algorithms for finding structure in data have become increasingly important both as tools for scientific data analysis and as models of human learning, yet they suffer from a critical limitation. Scientists discover qualitatively new forms of structure in observed data: For instance, Linnaeus recognized the hierarchical organization of biological species, and Mendeleev recognized the periodic structure of the chemical elements. Analogous insights play a pivotal role in cognitive development: Children discover that object category labels can be organized into hierarchies, friendship networks are organized into cliques, and comparative relations (e.g., ‘bigger than’ or ‘better than’) respect a transitive order.”
Example used in the tute that made the various terms easy for me to follow were; ontology, books in the library. taxonomy, different animal species i.e humans-monkeys-fish etc. folksonomy, is like ‘tagging’ in Flickr, delicious and other websites.
A good website that uses folksonomy is the website RANDOM GOT BEAUTIFUL where people post images that relate to a set colour. The image can be of anything, or convey anything i.e documentary, artistic, political etc but the image must have one main colour source that can be place under a colour. 
There is no one main concept that can be used, as there are so many variables. A good example can be seen through folksonomy, as this method generally relies on the publics contribution to classify the information. However different cultures, teachings, languages etc can complicate individual to broader understanding. For example colours have various meanings, white means innocence, weddings, purity in the english culture but means death, loneliness in others like the chinese culture.
I found this quote from the web and i think it describes the use of categorsation quite well:
“Soergel (1985) points out that, because information is used for problem-solving, information systems are developed and extended in response to the problems that confront society.”
