IBM will soon experiment with folksonomy. They are motivated by a need to maintain the pace of updates to how information is organized in their intranet and a need to help users access their system.

From a post of Peter Van Dijck we came to know that folksonomies aren’t limited to a game for people surfing the Web. They begin to be considered as a necessary tool to improve information organization on the intranet.

A quote from an interesting talk at IA Summit entitled Traversing the Corporate Web: IA and Taxonomy at IBM :

IBM will soon experiment with folksonomy. They are motivated by a need to maintain the pace of updates to how information is organized in their intranet and a need to help users access their system.

Quoting from Bud at IBM’s Intranet and Folksonomy on The community Engine, some good points to explain why folksonomies can be a really precious tool for a large intranet:

• IBM uses a controlled taxonomy (3700 nodes circa) to represent the knowledge contained in the intranet and let people access relevant knowledge inside it (315,000 employees)
• learning a 3700 node taxonomy could be like a daunting task for users
• letting people classify items on the intranet with their own free tags, it would be possible to map between the user’s personal vocabulary and the official vocabulary, allowing the user to eventually search with their own vocabulary
• maintaining the taxonomy in light of changing business conditions is a daunting task, as well.Things are too rapidly changing for a centralized system to keep pace.
• Taxonomists can use data from people in the field in some systematic way to help update their centralized view

Finally:

To sum up, unless, as in the medical profession, people have years to spend acquiring a controlled vocabulary, some systematic means must be provided for mapping between their vocabulary and the standard. Folksonomy seems to provide one promising data collection method for doing so.
Second, in changing domains, some means must be provided for promulgating change across units that does not bog down in centralized, bureaucratic choke points. Again, folksonomy may provide a means toward one such mechanism

You can find the ppt for the IBM panel here

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 13th, 2005 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, External Articles, IBM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.