From Joshua Porter’s post IBM’s Taxonomies and Comparing Knowledge Systems a link to a report (not free) from David Weinberger about the relationships between Taxonomies (trees), Faceted Systems (Forests) and Tagging Systems (folksonomies as leaves).

The interesting conclusions of the report makes order on the last days discussions:

1. Because they are unambiguous, trees work well where information can be sharply delineated and is centrally controlled. Users are accustomed to browsing trees, so little or no end-user training is required. But trees are expensive to build and maintain and require the user to understand the subject area well: How do you find the recipe for bread soup if you don’t know to look in the “Tuscan Cooking� category?
2. Faceted systems work splendidly where an application is being used by such a wide range of users that no one tree going to match everyone’s way thinking. They are also easier maintain than trees because adding new item requires only filling in the information about facets, rather having make decision exactly which category it should go into.
3. Tagging systems are possible only if people are motivated to do more of the work themselves, for individual and/or social reasons. They are necessarily sloppy systems, so if it’s crucial to find each and every object that has to do with, say, apples, tagging won’t work. But for an inexpensive, easy way of using the wisdom of the crowd to make resources visible and sortable, there’s nothing like tags.

Thank you Joshua!

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