02 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Ontologies vs. Folksonomies
It is argued - though currently the arguments are filtering only slowly into the academic literature - that folksonomies are preferable to the use of controlled, centralised ontologies [e.g. 259]. Annotating Web pages using controlled vocabularies will improve the chances of one's page turning up on the 'right' Web searches, but on the other hand the large heterogeneous user base of the Web is unlikely to contain many people (or organisations) willing to adopt or maintain a complex ontology. ...Ontologies provide structure and a standard for tagging and searching, while folksonomies provide for an emergent system for tagging things.