Volume 5, No 3, 2008
Descriptor and Folksonomy Concurrence in Education Related Scholarly Research
Robert Bruce
Abstract
Folksonomies are a decentralized yet collaborative form of classification based on user-defined keywords (also known as tags). Although this uncontrolled method of classification lacks rules for term standardization and usage, it has potential for organizational patterns and an emerging vocabulary (terminology). The objective of this research is to analyze the descriptors and tags from journal articles indexed in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) and the folksonomy-based website CiteULike to determine overlap between the controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies. Metadata from 2,786 journal articles indexed in ERIC and CiteULike was collected using Perl and MySQL. The total metadata was comprised of 2,899 unique ERIC descriptors, 3,176 unique CiteULike tags, and 1,083 unique CiteULike users. An analysis of this metadata revealed that 240 of the CiteULike tags matched ERIC descriptors. The low number of tag-descriptor matches in this research indicates that CiteULike users do not use the same terminology as subject specialists who maintain descriptors in the ERIC thesaurus.
Pages: 1-4
Keywords: Collaborative tagging; Social tagging; Social classification; Knowledge organization; Taxonomies; Folksonomies; Controlled vocabulary; Descriptors