Hierarchical Subject Relationships in Folksonomies
S. Kome. School of Information and Library Science, (November 2005)
The growth in digital resource repositories flickr and del.icio.us, mirrors the growth of Folksonomies to support resource classification and access. Despite this phenomenon, little is known about the effectiveness of folksonomy for retrieval and organization. Little is also known about their structure and the types of semantic relationships among folksonomy terms. This study analyzes folksonomy metadata for hierarchal semantic relationships via a content analysis of approximately 2000 folksonomy tags in over 600 individual entries. The terms were classified into groups and analyzed for hierarchical relationships. The results indicate that hierarchical relationships are part of Folksonomies. The conclusion briefly explores the potential value of thesauri for Folksonomy development, and the value of Folksonomies to thesauri developers.
